


Refrigerator Girl

by cassandramortmain



Series: Dispatches from the Refrigerator [1]
Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fridging, Spooning, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Travel, Voyeurism, dub con, they are cute but they are fucked up, this ship is fucked up you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:48:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28229400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassandramortmain/pseuds/cassandramortmain
Summary: Alisha is in the freezer.
Relationships: Simon Bellamy/Alisha Daniels
Series: Dispatches from the Refrigerator [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2067915
Comments: 12
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I said to myself, "You know what would be a great fandom to write for in 2020, five years after the fandom trailed off? Misfits."
> 
> This fic is indebted to all of the Simon/Alisha fic I read circa 2009 — 2011, which influenced my reading of the characters. Specifically, stainofmylove developed the practice of Alisha calling Future Simon her future boy, and I believe also had the innovation of angsty spooning through layers of blankets. And like all fics that try to cover the full time loop, this one owes a structural debt to AbsoluteIris's "Written In Reverse." 
> 
> The epigram is from "Glow" by Dave Malloy.
> 
> Anything else you recognize belongs to better writers than I.
> 
> This fic is complete, and one chapter will go up every day.

_It’d be fun if we were kids with flashlights, telling each other our secrets in our linen cave. Oh babe, where did you go?_

One night — one of the quiet nights when it’s just the two of them in that silent flat, curled up in bed and whispering back and forth under the sheets, like kids with torches — one of those nights, Alisha asks Simon about what happened with Sally. 

“We’d already gotten rid of loads of bodies by then,” Alisha says.

“Just two,” Simon says, because he is a freak and he remembers things like that.

“Two dead bodies _is_ loads, Simon,” she tells him, rolling her eyes, and he laughs silently. She likes the way he gets when it’s just the two of them like this, warm and relaxed and completely intent on her. Like everything she says and everything she does matters.

“You could have dumped her in the lake yourself,” she goes on. “Just gotten on with it and pretended it never happened. But you stuck her in the fridge instead.”

“It was a freezer,” he objects.

“That’s not better,” she informs him, and he sort of shrug-nods, the way he does when she tells him he’s being creepy and he can’t really argue. 

“So why did you hold onto her?” she asks. 

At that he looks down, finally embarrassed, and she traces her fingers over his arm in encouragement. Doesn’t say anything else, lets him take his time with it.

He’ll tell her sooner or later. He tells her anything she asks him. Lots of things she doesn’t, too.

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” he says eventually.

“Yeah,” she says, “I know,” and pets his arm a little more.

“I was just trying to get my phone back, and I pushed her too hard, and she hit her head,” he goes on. “It happened so suddenly. I didn’t know what to do, really. It hurt so much to think about that I couldn’t make myself think it through. The lake didn’t even occur to me. So I suppose I thought that if I put her in the freezer, it would buy me a little time until I could think clearly again.”

“Yeah,” Alisha says. “But why else did you do it?”

He goes very still, and then he looks up at her with his eyes slanted. Like he’s running the odds in his head that she’ll run screaming out of the bed if he tells her. 

“It’s okay,” she tells him. “I know you were protecting us. I just want to know the rest of it, too.”

He’s quiet for so long that she starts to think maybe this is the one thing she won’t get out of him. Then he says, “I used to go and visit her in the freezer.”

Alisha holds her breath. Feels an awful urge to laugh. She can just picture it: Simon with his jumpsuit done all the way up, sitting too straight next to poor frozen dead Sally. Proper as a tea party.

“It was before we were really friends, you know,” he says, “and she had been nice to me. I know now it was just to get to us, but I didn’t know that while it was happening. I just wanted to pretend it was still going on. That it hadn’t all been a lie. It was like if she was frozen, I could freeze that moment in time, too. And then it would always be happening.”

“Lonely boy,” says Alisha, and kisses him. “You’re a little bit fucked up, Simon, you know that?”

“Yeah,” he says, eyes bright on hers, “I’ve heard.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “You’ve got me now. You don’t have to go around freezing corpses for company anymore as long as I’m around.” 

*

Alisha asks Simon out not that long after they finish their community service. 

They’re at the bar where she and Curtis have started jobs. Nathan is climbing up on the table to illustrate something disgusting with extreme vigor, and Kelly is shaking her head and saying, “Fuck’s sake, _fuck’s sake_ ,” and Curtis is curling an arm around Nikki’s bare shoulders as she shields her eyes, and Simon — Simon is just staring, in that appalled way he has when he watches Nathan. Where it’s just slightly tinged with awe, as though he can’t believe anyone so appalling actually exists.

She never used to notice the _way_ Simon stared. He just: stared. And it was creepy and probably involved wanking in some way Alisha didn’t care to think about, and that was as far as her train of thought on the subject ever went.

Now she notices. She's developed a little catalog for all the ways he stares. She doesn’t like it.

He did that to her. He went and got all fit and confident and sexy and then traveled back in time for the express purpose of forcing her to start wanting his weird creepy arse. And then he went and left her stuck like that. With no one there for her to bring her wanting to, except for this freak with the beautiful eyes.

He never stares at her when she’s looking. Sometimes when he thinks she’s not, but he always looks away as soon as she catches his eye. Afraid of her. 

He will never, ever try to see her again now their community service is done if she doesn’t do something, she thinks, and she feels panic curdling in her throat at the thought.

So afterwards, as they’re leaving, she lingers behind him, touches the toe of her shoe to the heel of his, tosses her hair when he turns inquiringly towards her. She asks him does he want to go get a pizza tomorrow night and he says yes. 

*

When she gets to the pizza shop the next night fucking _Nathan_ is there. Simon is there with a pizza in front of him, sitting too straight with his fringe too neat, and he’s wearing that fucking blue button-up with the buttons done up all the way, and the shirt brings out his eyes and his lovely shoulders, and he’s sitting there waiting for her and half-smiling at fucking _Nathan_. Who’s gone and fucking eaten half the cheese on the pizza, too.

“Hiya,” says Alisha and sort of tries to smile but without putting too much effort in. Not that Nathan would notice. Prick.

Simon does, though; his eyes are sliding cautiously over her, and she feels the smile turn real without her meaning to let it as she sits down and catches his eye. His face relaxes, then, and he sits back and eats his pizza and looks so fucking happy to be sitting there with both of them across the table in front of him.

So Alisha resigns herself to nibbling on her pizza as Nathan continues telling a long and obscene story about a girl he supposedly fucked once who had an extroverted vagina. Actually it’s not so bad, Alisha always likes sex stories. She’s running out of her own to tell, too, since lately either she’s just wanking herself off in a storage cupboard while absolutely no one touches her or she’s having amazing sex she can’t tell anyone about because it would create a time paradox, whatever that is. Nathan sex stories are always gross but they’re better than nothing.

After twenty minutes the pizza is mostly gone, Simon’s eyebrows are up around his hairline the way they get when he’s trying not to laugh, and Alisha is trying to construct a model vagina out of a napkin to demonstrate to Nathan the ways his story is wrong — “because it doesn’t do that, okay, it literally couldn’t, you’re such a fucking idiot —”

“— no, that’s what I’m telling you, man, the fanny was _wrong-way out_ —” Nathan grabs the napkin and crumples it outward to demonstrate. “It was like _that_!”

“They just don’t do that!”

“What, and you’re some sort of vagina expert now? How many vaginas have you seen?”

“I’ve seen mine!”

“Well, maybe it’s weird-looking!”

Alisha gapes at him. “Did you just say I’ve got a weird-looking vagina?”

“Well I don’t see why you couldn’t!” says Nathan staunchly. 

Alisha turns in horror to Simon. He’s doing his appalled stare again, although he makes no move to step in and defend the honor of Alisha’s vagina. Which is perfect, thank you very much. 

“I bet Curtis’ll back me up when he gets here — Curtis!” Nathan leans away from the table towards the door, yelling like Curtis is just outside with vagina testimonials and can hear him. “Curtis! I need the wisdom of your experience on Alisha’s — _Jesus_!” Outraged, Nathan dabs with a napkin at the lukewarm pizza grease Alisha has flicked onto his face. “There’s no need for that sort of violence,” he concludes, much quieter. “It was just some innocent conversation between friends about their genitals. After all we’ve been through together surely we all deserve to know.” 

“I don’t think that’s quite how it works,” Simon observes.

“Oh, what do you know, you little freak, you’ve never had friends,” Nathan says, and Alisha takes herself by surprise by the sharpness with which she says, “Oh, and you have?”

“That’s very hurtful, I’ve got dozens of friends,” says Nathan. “Kelly’ll tell you when she gets here. When is she getting here, anyway? I need her to protect my pizza from Curtis. You know how athletes eat everything. That’s why I never do athletics of any sort, so I eat like a bird and can preserve my girlish figure.”

“Curtis isn’t going to steal your pizza,” says Simon, “he’s lactose intolerant,” which is news to Alisha but it’s the kind of thing Simon notices. He’s like that about small things.

“Curtis isn’t _coming_ ,” says Alisha. “Neither is Kelly.” Simon turns towards her, his face polite and quizzicle, and she hates how absolutely stupid she feels right now. “I didn’t ask them, all right?” she says. “I just asked you.”

Simon’s face is still blank, and then Nathan starts laughing, low and dirty and delighted. “Hold on here. Did I crash a _date_?” he says. “Did you ask Barry on a _date_ to the pizza shop? Were you going to give him your varsity jacket and shag in the toilets —”

“Go see if you can stuff your cock up your areshole,” says Alisha, and as she storms away from the table Nathan is hooting after her and she can feel Simon’s eyes boring a hole into her, confused and a little bit afraid.

Stupid. God, she’s so stupid. Of course he wouldn’t get that it was supposed to be a date without her telling him, it’s _Simon_. She should have just said it: _This is a date. We’re dating now. The two of us are together._ What would he have done, said no?

She goes to his stupid uncomfortable flat and curls up on his stupid big wonderful bed that doesn’t smell at all like him anymore, and she lets herself wallow in how much she hates all of it: how much she hates that he’s gone, how he’s still here but he’s not her boy yet and she doesn’t know if he ever will be and what if he’s not? What if she never gets him back again? What the fuck will she do then with all these feelings he left her?

She’s on edge enough that she lets herself take the Vegas picture out of her bag and pet it, which she doesn’t that often because every time she looks at it she goes completely to pieces, and she’s just about worked herself up into a nice draining hour-long cry when suddenly:

“When was that taken?”

And then Simon is in front of her, visible out of nowhere, and he’s staring at her like she’s the one who’ll vanish if he takes his eyes off her for an instant.

*

After she tells him everything she expects not to hear from him for a while, but instead he meets her the next day at the bar. Sits bolt upright with an untouched beer in front of him, stares at a point slightly to the right of her head. 

“I’ve been thinking a lot,” he says, and blushes slightly, “about what you said yesterday. And I think that it’s important that we keep the loop stable.” Then there’s a long and circuitous analogy involving the differences between the plots of _Terminator 1_ and _Terminator 2_ , which, Alisha gathers three minutes in, are both films. 

“Okay,” she says, when he seems to have finished. “So. Does that mean you want to be my boyfriend?”

He stops breathing and snaps his eyes onto her, large and bewildered and afraid. She can see him steeling himself to respond. After a second he says: “Yes.” 

Of course he does; who wouldn’t? All the same champagne bubbles of giddiness float up her chest. 

“Okay,” she says again, “good.” 

A tremulous and bewildered joy lights up his eyes, and she can feel herself smiling helplessly. 

*

He’s afraid to tell the others.

“Why?” she asks, teasing. “Are you ashamed of me?”

“I’d _never_ be ashamed of you,” he says, very earnest, and her heart feels too big for her chest for a second. “But — they’ll think it’s. Weird.” 

“Nathan will, you mean,” she says. “But who cares what that prick thinks?”

Simon looks at his hands and mutters something that sounds like “Curtis,” and she has to admit that Curtis definitely will think it’s weird.

“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” Alisha says. “It’s not their business.” 

Simon looks doubtful, and she touches the toe of her shoe to his, which is the best thing she’s come up with so far to replace hand contact. “It only matters how we feel about it,” she says, which she’s not sure she believes but seems like the right thing to say, and is rewarded when that shocked delight swims across his face again, and he looks at her like she’s hung the moon.

He expects so little. It’s so easy to please him. He was like that even when he was the other him: she would do little everyday things, girlfriend things like getting him a glass of water when she got up in the night or telling him he looked fit in one particular shirt, and he would be undone.

He’s not wrong about telling their friends, though. She knows how it looks, the two of them. And it makes her feel itchy and uncomfortable, just thinking about how Nathan will cackle and Curtis will judge. 

Nikki’s a wild card, she thinks, but Kelly might be all right.

But in the end, Kelly’s the one who tells on them. 

They’re all out at the bar, like they are at least once a week now. Nikki’s in the middle of verbally abusing Nathan, which is one of the great joys she has brought to their little group, and the rest of them have sat back to watch the show. In the lull Alisha glances reflexively over at Simon, and when he looks back at her she feels her face light up without her meaning to let it, a-fucking-gain, and then his is too, and they’re just sort of beaming at each other across the filthy table while Nikki is calling Nathan ever more specific kinds of dickhead, and then Kelly says, “The two of you?” 

Her voice is loud with shock, and it cuts through Nikki’s tirade. “Two of them what?” says Curtis.

Simon is a deer in headlights.

“The two of you,” Kelly says again, and waves her hands in a vague pattern meant to suggest, Alisha guesses, romance. “I read your minds. All, sort of.” She waves her hands again. “Gooey.”

There’s a bewildered silence.

“Are you two shagging a tray full of brownies?” Nathan suggests. 

“Fuck’s sake,” says Alisha. “All right, fine. We’re …” her voice starts to trail off, Simon looks at her in a panic, and she finishes lamely, “together.” There’s still silence, so she clarifies. “Like a couple.”

More silence, longer and more bewildered. Then:

“Are you taking the piss?” says Nikki.

“ _Barry_!” Nathan crows, and leaps over to grab him by the shoulders. “The hidden _depths_ , man, I always knew —”

“You and _him_?” says Curtis, staring.

“That’s actually dead romantic,” says Kelly.

“Fuck’s sake,” says Alisha. 

*

Dating without touching someone is strange. Dating Simon is strange.

What it is, mostly, is them walking around together with a decorous foot of distance between them at all times. He meets her at her parents’ house before a shift at the bar and walks her there. He comes to the bar when her shift is over and walks her home.

Sometimes they go for a drink, or to eat. Once she drags him to a club, and he stands stock still in the corner and looks panicked while she tries to dance without touching anyone and gets sweaty and frustrated from the effort. 

Sometimes they watch movies. He always makes sure he sits on the opposite end of the couch from her.

Once she lets him talk her into watching the first episode of _Battlestar Galactica_ and then has to physically restrain herself from breaking every DVD in his tidy little box set after she realizes exactly how many episodes there are. As revenge she makes him watch _Pirates of the Caribbean_ and ends up spending the entire time getting drunk on rum drinks and heckling Jack Sparrow. 

“The ghost rules don’t make sense,” Simon says, sounding genuinely upset about this. “They’re inconsistent.”

“That’s exactly it,” Alisha says, impassioned. “That’s how watching films is supposed to be. You’re not supposed to just sit there. You’re supposed to yell.” 

“But then how do you follow the story?” he asks her, and then his eyebrows do that laughing thing when she says disdainfully, “Only _losers_ care about the _story_.” 

Curtis pulls her aside one day when they’re both working at the bar and asks her if she’s sure she knows what she’s doing, and to tell him if Simon does anything.

“Anything like what?” she asks.

He rolls his eyes. “Dunno, just. Anything weird.” 

“Are you calling my boyfriend weird?” she demands.

He stares at her. “You trying to tell me he’s not?”

Of course she knows he’s weird. But it’s not all together as weird as she thought it would be.

It’s easier to talk to him than she thought it would be. 

They hadn’t really talked a lot before, even with the other him; there were more entertaining things to do then. She thought it would be awkward with this him since really they don’t have that much in common, and that maybe it would bother him when she got mean. But actually he mostly thinks it’s funny when she’s mean, even though he tries not to laugh at her, either because he’s still scared of her or because he respects her. And he listens to all the things she tells him, really listens, even though a lot of it’s bullshit. He doesn’t get Chloe and Ellie mixed up, no matter how many stories she tells him about them. She likes that. 

He doesn’t ever forget himself and try to touch her, not once. Doesn’t ever get near enough to her for it to be a problem, and flinches away whenever she drifts close to him.

The thing is. If you spend a lot of time with someone, and it’s nice, it really is, but all you’re doing is talking: is that actually dating?

“I think it is,” he says. “I mean. We said we’re dating. So aren’t we?”

“But we haven’t even _kissed_ , Simon,” she says. “We haven’t even held hands. I haven’t gone past the first date without kissing since I was eleven!” 

His eyes have drifted down to her hands and stay fixed there, petrified. “Do you really want to. Um.” 

She guesses what he wants to say. “Of course I want to kiss you, Simon,” she snaps. “You’re my boyfriend. Don’t be an idiot.” 

She scowls at him and he smiles helplessly, still watching her hands. “I could get gloves,” he says. 

Alisha pictures the cleaning gloves he wore when the virtue virgins were recruiting, squeaky at the edges and smelling of plastic, and cringes. “What kind?” 

He shrugs, finally meets her eyes, face pink, eyes so happy. “I don’t know,” he says. “Wool or something. I don’t know. It’s getting cold, anyway.” 

She thinks about it. “Fine,” she says, and the next day when he’s standing outside her parents’ door he’s wearing gray wool gloves. 

The wool is cheap, and the gloves itch against her bare skin. She interlaces their fingers anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

Moving in together is her idea. 

That’s the dividing line between friends who hold hands and a proper couple, isn’t it? Friends who hold hands walk each other home, but a proper couple goes home together, because they live together. They sleep in the same bed.

“What about,” says Simon, when she tells him what she wants. What about her power, is what he means. 

“We’ll figure it out,” Alisha says, a little harsher than she intends to, and he just nods. 

“Separate sheets,” he says suddenly two hours later, while she’s in the middle of explaining that she doesn’t care if he thinks her frilly lamp shades are too girly, she just isn’t going to live her life under fluorescent bulbs. “On the. That could keep us from touching,” he clarifies. “Two different sets of sheets. On the bed.” 

“Sorted, then,” says Alisha, and just like that it’s all planned out. 

*  
Simon is teaching himself parkour. Which he doesn’t tell her until the day she lets herself into the flat and finds him trying to ice a bruise on his shoulder with skinned and abraded hands. 

“What the _fuck_ ,” says Alisha, and runs over, catching herself just before she tries to take the ice out of his hands and see the bruise herself. “Did someone do this to you? Who was it? You don’t need to give me their name, just their face, I’ll use my power on them and I’ll put it on YouTube, you can video it since you like that —”

“No,” says Simon, “no one did anything, it was me, I fell.”

“Oh,” says Alisha. 

“Would you really do that?” he says, looking very touched. “Humiliate someone for me?”

“Course I would,” Alisha says. “What the fuck do you mean, you fell? Fell off what?”

“A roof,” he says. “You shouldn’t go out using your power like that, though, you know; it’s dangerous.”

“Danger — what do you mean you fell off a _roof_? What were you doing on a _roof_?”

“Only a low one. First story,” he says. “I was practicing.”

She doesn’t get it, so he pulls out his laptop and shows her a video: some fit-looking idiot in a speedsuit running up a roof and then doing backflips off of it. “I’m not doing that, yet, obviously,” he says. “But you need to get the fundamentals of jumps and balancing before you do anything else, and it’s hard to get the psychology without at least a little bit of height.”

She can’t breathe. Feels as shocked as though he’d slapped her. “You’re telling me,” she says slowly, “that you’re going around teaching yourself to jump off of _roofs_?”

He prattles on, oblivious. “Not just roofs, although I mean, obviously, that’s most of what he did, as far as I ever saw. But that one time I followed him to Nikki’s flat — I’d never seen anything like it, the way he moves, and he was wounded, then. Or I was wounded. Will be? Anyway. It’ll take a lot of work for me to get to that level, so I’ve got to be serious about practicing from the get-go. Did he ever tell you anything about how he learned?”

She doesn’t know if she’s ever been so furious in her life. “I never _asked_ , Simon,” she says.

He finally picks up on her tone, flinches back. “Oh,” he says. “I didn’t think it would worry you. I mean — I thought you knew. I thought this was what you wanted.” His hands crawl towards the laptop screen in a crabbed, furtive gesture. “For me to become him.”

He has a point. It is what she wants. Only — 

She wants him to be the him he was before, strong and confident and fit and not so fucking anxious all the time, so worried she’ll change her mind about him every second. The kind of person who could rescue her from a mugger and sweep her off her feet without a second thought. She wants that so badly, and she’s tired of looking for glimpses of that boy in this pale weirdo who’s watching her so earnestly right now, so helplessly, waiting for her to tell him she doesn’t hate him. 

But she doesn’t want him to die. 

And if he does this, if he becomes the other him …

“I thought you knew,” he goes on lamely. “I told you we needed to keep the loop stable. So I’ve got to —”

“Got to take it seriously,” she echos. “Right.” She shuts the laptop, stands up, steps safely away from him and out of reach. “It just surprised me, that’s all.”

*

Sleeping in the same bed with someone she can’t have sex with is the worst idea she’s ever had. 

The sheets on the bed smell like him again. They use two separate sets, so their bodies are always separated by two layers of cotton, but they still smell like him. It’s the same bed, and when they’re lying in it together she can feel the warmth of him two sheets away, and all her best memories keep running through her head in surround sound and she’s got absolutely no way of reliving them. 

Ridiculous to get so worked up over _Simon_. To get worked up over this Simon, anyway, who remains substantially squirrelier than her usual type. It’s some sense memory thing, probably. Pheromones or something that she doesn’t understand but he probably does. She could just get him some cologne and that would take care of it.

She doesn’t buy him cologne. Regardless of how often she reminds herself it is ridiculous she still feels worked up.

They’re starting to bicker like an old married couple, only at least old marrieds, she thinks wildly, can shag if they want to. They’re fighting about the stupidest things, too, like housework and cleaning. She’s messy and he’s tidy, which she supposes she should have seen coming; this concrete slab of a flat had been spartan when he’d lived there by himself. The other him. 

And all those shirts he wears with the collars so neat. The way he arranges his fringe so carefully. She wants to muss him up, push back his hair, show off his throat, make his eyes go wide. She wants to fuck him up.

What makes the fights worse is he’s still too scared of her to yell, but not so scared of her anymore that he’ll back off. So when she leaves her bag and shoes in a careless heap on the floor he’ll sigh in a long-suffering way, and when she says “ _What_ ,” cold and mean, he just says, “Just wondering how it got so messy,” and then they’re off.

At least if they could fuck there would be something they could do with all this stupid pointless tension. 

“We’ve got to find a way to have sex,” she tells him finally one morning, after a row about why she’s left her cereal bowl from yesterday’s breakfast sitting in the sink all night. “We’re going to kill each other otherwise.”

Simon doesn’t look utterly petrified, which is how she knows she’s really driven him to the edge, but he does blush and start to scrub the cereal bowl. “I don’t think,” he says carefully, “that I can do what you and Curtis did.”

Of course he can’t, he still puts on his pajamas in the loo every night and looks the other way if she changes in front of him. He still can’t wrap his head around the idea that she might like to look at him, might like to have him look at her. 

But, it occurs to Alisha, she doesn’t have to look at him to get this done. 

“What if you were invisible?” she asks. “While I did it.”

He goes very still at that. One of his hands tightens on the sink faucet, then switches it off. 

Oh, he likes that idea. That freak. That creep. He’s such a fucking pervert, her boy.

“All right,” he says.

He won’t say anything more about it just then, but two days later Alisha opens the door from the lift to the flat and catches just a glimpse of Simon standing in the bedroom before he twitches out of sight.

“Simon?” she says, and he doesn’t say anything, and then she knows what he wants.

“Oh,” she says, mouth quirking, “okay.” Walks through the chain link curtain to their bedroom and takes off her top, falling into a pose with one hand on her hip. “Well?” she says.

There’s no response.

Right. He can’t say anything when he’s invisible. Or he can say things, probably, but she can’t hear him. 

She knew that about his power. She just hadn’t thought about that part of things that morning she suggested it. 

She hadn’t thought it through. It had just popped into her head, a solution to his shyness, and she’d suggested it before she’d considered all the angles. Simon would never do that; he was good at thinking all the possibilities through. That was why he was the one in their group who generally planned shit.

It’s just that she had imagined it being the two of them together. She had wanted to be able to hear him even if she couldn’t see him, wanted to tease him into talking her through it.

_Well, that clearly just isn’t going to happen, is it, Alisha?_ she asks herself crossly. _So then what are you going to do now?_

“Okay,” she says again, “okay.” 

She unhooks her bra. Sits down on the edge of the bed, trying to move carelessly, like she’s alone, and takes off her shoes, her socks. Slips off her skirt and then her panties, and thinks maybe she hears his breath sharpen as she straightens up and then lays back down on the bed. But of course she’s imagining that: she wouldn’t be able to hear him breathing at all if he’s invisible.

Her mind feels blank. Dull. She closes her eyes, breathes deep and slow. Thinks about Simon standing next to the bed, watching her, and drags the flat of her palm down her stomach and to her sex.

Oh fuck. She’s barely even wet. This is not working for her at all.

She resents that it’s not working. It should be working. Alisha likes to be watched. She likes to be admired, likes to be the center of silent, worshipful attention. Or loud, cheering attention. Either one is fine.

But for it to work she has to be able to tell her audience is there. At least hear them. This silent invisibility isn’t getting her there at all.

Maybe she can tell him she’s changed her mind. Make him go visible again, tell him he doesn’t have to wank himself off in front of her if he doesn’t want to, but he should at least let her see his eyes on her while she does it. It’s selfish of him not to.

Shit. No. She can’t say that to him.

He doesn’t know how to do what she wants. He’s not that him yet. It was just a couple of months ago that he was still a virgin, and as far as she knows he hasn’t done anything since that first time. All he really knows about sex is whatever he’s picked up from the weird creepy sites he likes to trawl on the internet. He’s done so very little of this, and she knows he’s still ashamed of all the things she’s heard him say when her power hit him. 

He’s worried about disgusting her. He doesn’t trust himself to do anything without disgusting her. He thinks if they do it this way he’ll be safe, and she saw his face when she suggested it: he wants this.

He told her she was a good teacher. The other him did. She has to be so careful with this him. 

She can do this. She can make it good for him. She just has to think of something really good.

That first time, when it felt like no one had ever touched her before in her life, like she was starving for it, and his hands were on her like she was made of glass. So gentle and so sure, she was surprised at how sure they were as he undressed her and laid her on the bed, and the whole time he was watching her with a kind of desperation, as though if he weren’t careful she might just vanish — 

No. That isn’t a good road to go down. Thinking about how sad he was all the time, the things he wouldn’t say about the time he came from. That isn’t going to get her anywhere she wants to go.

She leaves her left hand where it is, teasing very gently around her sex, and draws her right hand deliberately up, across her chest. Traces one finger in circles around her nipple, not quite touching. He was very good at that, her boy; he liked being slow and teasing and not touching her the way she wanted to be touched until he had her whimpering for it. “Should I make you scream?” he asked her one time, and he handed her a pillow to cover her mouth with when he did.

That’s better. A better place for her mind. She keeps up her deliberate, delicate circles with just the tip of one finger, bringing up goose pimples on her skin. Is that the sound of his clothes brushing against the sheets next to her? Sometimes it works that way; she hears footsteps sometimes when he’s invisible even when she can’t hear anything else. She strains her ears. It could be him. It could be her imagination. At last she slides the tip of her finger over a nipple and shudders, and there’s a maybe-rustle next to her, like maybe he’s shuddering too.

Is this how he learned to touch her like that? Was it from watching her? 

She’s getting wetter now. She slips one finger inside of herself, just one, and sighs, and then she hears a zipper, she’s certain of it, and the bed, the bed is dipping under his weight as he climbs in next to her. “Simon,” she says, craning her body towards the weight of his. 

The bed stops moving. She can’t even hear fabric moving anymore.

He doesn’t want her to acknowledge him. He wants her to act like he’s not there, doesn’t he? He likes this bit, the bit where she can’t tell whether he’s there or not. It’s what he’s into. This him, anyway. 

“Okay,” she says, and straightens out on top of the sheets so she’s not listing towards his side anymore. “Sorry.”

All right. So he wants her to put on a show for him. Fine. It’s fine. She’s used to putting on shows, it’s what she does. She’s good at it. She takes a sharp, determined breath and sends her mind out for something that will make heat flare between her legs as she works one finger in and out of herself.

That first time, when he crawled between her legs and kissed her knee, and then a line down her thigh, and then he licked her open with the flat of her tongue. God, it had been so long, and he was so eager, and he knew exactly where to touch her. She lets her thumb draw circles around her clit. He hadn’t bothered to tease her that time, had just given her what she needed, but he knew how long she’d been waiting, then, didn’t he? Anyway, that had been for her. This is for him. She can do this for him.

Simon. God, Simon’s shoulders. Curtis’s arse. The tattoo on this bloke she fucked a year ago at one of Ellie’s parties, a lizard with its tail wrapped around his abs and his obliques just so.

This one time with Curtis in the supply closet at the community center, when she told him she wanted to suck him off next to the vending machines and he made this helpless little sound, as though he’d never heard anything so filthy before. 

That time her future boy couldn’t wait for her to get all the way out of the lift before he was on her, hands ripping at her bra, her panties, and they’d fucked desperately against the cold metal of the lift door, half-dressed and frantic.

If she could just have his hands on her again. She would someday; he told her so. He told her a lot of things. He was a fucking liar. His hands are so beautifully shaped, those long elegant fingers, and stronger than she thought they would be. They are even now, she can tell through those awful gloves he still wears to hold her hand. And his fingers are longer than hers, they can reach places she can’t, even though — she crooks the finger inside her, adds a second — she knows how to get herself where she wants.

The way he looked at her when he was inside her. No one had ever been so certain of anything, since the whole world began, as he was that he was in the right place when he was inside her. It took her breath away. She swipes her thumb across her clit. “Simon,” she says. “Simon.”

The bed settles next to her. She can feel his body heat. He must be so close to her right now. She whines, imagining it, her fingers moving in and out of herself faster now. Keeps her eyes shut, so she doesn’t have to not see him. She could just reach over and touch him. She could — she could — 

“It’ll all work out in the end,” he said, like a fucking liar. 

Simon pinning her to the bed with his lovely strong hands. Simon looking up at her the first time he went down on her, like he wanted to watch while he made her fall apart. Simon on the bed next to her, watching her, so eager, trying to learn from her. Simon falling through the skylight in front of the bullet. Simon on the ground with his blood pumping hot and viscous over her hands, telling her to burn his body. The smell of the ash when she did, the grease of it on her tongue. “It’s all coming together,” he said.

“Alisha,” he says. “What’s wrong? Did you —”

She blinks her eyes open. They’re stinging, for some reason.

Oh. She’s started crying. Shit.

“Sorry,” she says, “sorry,” pulling her hands away from herself, reaching for a sheet, trying to cover up, because it’s so embarrassing, to be naked when you’re crying; it’s quite different to being naked in a sexy way.

Simon’s visible now, sitting on the bed next to her. He’s half hard and jutting out from his trousers but he doesn’t seem to notice; he’s watching her with such earnest confusion. “What happened?” he asks. “Did you hurt yourself?” 

She laughs at that, a little hysterically; sure, why not, tell him she didn’t trim her nails close enough and now she’s gone and scratched her cunt. “Must’ve done,” she says, and scrambles out of bed for a long, scalding shower.

She doesn’t get out until she’s rubbed her skin raw. Puts on her littlest slip to sleep in, because she has her fucking pride, and walks back to the bed.

He’s sitting on top of the sheets in his prim little pajamas, buttoned all the way up to the neck. Rigid with worry. There’s a cup of tea in his hands, and another one steaming on her side of the bed, waiting for her. The clothes she left on the floor are all in a neat little folded pile now.

Simon reminds her of her gran sometimes. For some stupid reason it makes her feel like crying again.

She smiles bright and climbs under her personal bedsheets, on her personal side of the bed that her boyfriend never gets personally close to, and ignores the tea. “I don’t think that way is going to work,” she says. “We’ll have to figure something else out.” 

“There’s lots of ways,” Simon says vaguely, like he would even know, and peers down at her. “Are you all right? Did I — was it something I did?”

“Don’t be stupid, Simon, what could you possibly have done?” she says, meanly. “I’m fine.”


	3. Chapter 3

Simon frets over her for the next few days. Brings her drinks and hot towels and slippers; would probably rub her feet if he could. It annoys her, how watchful he is, and then she feels guilty for feeling annoyed. 

He’s also, she’s pretty sure, kind of disappointed that the sex she suggested didn’t pan out. He doesn’t say anything — of course not; he’ll monologue on the differences between a Cylon and a robot but god forbid he discuss their sex life — but he looks a little wistful along with worried, and he keeps staring off into space and then going invisible without explanation.

She hates it. The way he just takes himself off and out of sight whenever he feels like it without saying anything to her. She wants to keep him right where he is, right where she can look at him all she pleases. Why not? Everyone’s always looking at her. Him included. 

Maybe especially, she thinks, when he’s invisible and she can’t look back.

She’s not sure of it. Once she’s changing in the bedroom and the hairs on the back of her neck prickle, like there’s someone there, watching her, but when she says his name there’s no response. Another time she’s in the shower and she thinks she hears someone rustling near her, but by the time she shuts the water off it’s gone.

One night comes home from a late shift at the bar and doesn’t see him, but there’s a half-drunk beer out on the table that makes her positive he’s there. He’s absurdly anal about putting away food, there’s no way he’s left their flat without cleaning it up. 

“Simon?” she says.

No response.

But she narrows her eyes at the beer and she knows. He’s there, all right. He’s just not visible.

Infuriating. 

_Fine_ , she thinks, _that’s what you get, then_ , and marches silently through the chainlink curtains and up to the shower. Strips off all her clothes as the water heats up and steps inside the stall and under the spray. Stares at the glass, feeling every nerve ending on her body lit up and alert.

It takes a few minutes, but then there it is. A little fog on the other side of the glass. Someone breathing that’s not her. She reaches her hand out from the stall fast and blind, feels skin, and then Simon staggers into visibility again, blue veins blooming under the skin of his jaw where her hand has landed, eyes glazed. 

“I want to fuck you underwater till you choke,” he says.

She comes out of the stall dripping water, the spray still running behind her, moving carefully so her hand stays on his skin. She can feel the bristle of his stubble coming in under her fingers. 

He’s standing still, hands balled into fists, tension bleeding off him in waves. Like he thinks he can fight it off. “Yeah?” she asks. 

“Want to tie you to the bed and eat jelly off your tits,” he says, “want to eat a lollipop out of your cunt —”

“I’ve heard a lot worse from you,” she tells him, and drags his jaw down so she can kiss him, open-mouthed and messy. 

There’s a split second where he stays stiff and unresponsive, just long enough for her to feel a panicked horror that it’s not working, and then a nauseated hope that maybe this is it, the moment he finally works out how to touch her. But as soon as she touches his tongue with hers the tension in his body snaps like a spring and he’s on her, pushing her back against the glass wall of the shower stall, kissing her with teeth. It’s such a relief, such a fucking relief, his hands harsh on her back, his cock hardening against her stomach inside his jeans. His voice is manic when he breaks away long enough to say, “Want to hold you down and tickle you till you scream —” 

_Should I make you scream_ , the other him had asked her.

She shoves him away before she has time to think about it, hard enough that he doubles over and ends up three giant steps away from her. 

It takes him a long, disoriented second to pull himself together. And then he just stands there. Mouth abraded and tender. Damp patches all down the front of his shirt from where he was pressed against her. Eyes huge.

She can feel scratches on her back where his nails were. She wants his hands to be on them again. His eyes are so helpless.

The water’s still running in the shower behind her. She turns around to switch it off, and then stays turned around, so she doesn’t have to look at him. 

There’s a rustle behind her and a touch at her shoulder and she jumps as she turns, but it’s not skin. Just a towel. Simon holds it up like a question and she nods, and then he wraps it around her, fingers delicate as they skirt her skin. 

When he’s done his hands linger. They’re standing so close. She shivers. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he says, and then steps away from her.

She knows she shouldn’t have. How dare he say that. “You shouldn’t have been _watching_ me,” she spits out.

He looks injured. “But you said I could —”

“When I said that I meant _once_ , and when I knew about it! Not, ‘Feel free to just creep about on me whenever you like.’ And you _knew_ that, so don’t pretend like you didn’t, you absolute arsehole.”

He flinches, then drags his hand across his jaw and nods like he’s decided something. “You’re right,” he says. “You’re right. You can. If it would make you feel better, you can. Touch, and I’ll just —”

She already feels like such shit, and now he’s giving in so quickly and taking the wind out of her sails, she can’t stand to have him finish that sentence. “Fuck’s sake, Simon!” she says. “It’s sex, it’s supposed to be for both of us! It’s not supposed to be an ordeal, or a _punishment_.” Not like that, anyway. 

He looks as wretched as she feels. “But I shouldn’t have,” he begins desperately. “I knew it, I knew it was wrong to watch you like that and I did it. And I’m telling you you can. I won’t mind it.”

She can feel tears starting. Humiliating. “This was supposed to be the one thing,” she says, and to her absolute horror her voice sways and cracks. “The one thing that my bullshit power hadn’t fucked up completely for me before it started. Where I could be _better_ than that, like I could deserve better —”

“But you do deserve better!” Simon cries out. “Of course you deserve better! Both of us know that. And I know you’re trapped in this, and I’m sorry. I’m trying to deserve you, I just can’t do it fast enough.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck, absolutely fuck. 

She wants to run away. But where could she even go? They live together.

She wraps her arms around her towel. “I need to get changed,” she says.

He walks away from her without another word.

*

Later, they’re in bed and he’s pretending to be asleep, but not well. She doesn’t even bother to pretend.

“Do you ever think we’re being punished?” she asks. “With our powers, I mean.”

He blinks his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling. Doesn’t say anything for so long she begins to think he hasn’t heard. But then: “Nathan doesn’t think so.”

“Oh, well, if _Nathan_ says,” she says, teasing a little, and he half smiles. “Immortality’s not so bad when you piss off as many murderers as he has, I suppose. But I mean,” she goes on, “Curtis wants so badly to go back and do it all over again, but when he tried that it just fucked everything up worse.” 

Simon goes a bit tense, like he does sometimes when Curtis comes up. Fair enough. If she had to hang about with Jessica all day she’d kill someone.

“Kelly never likes what she hears people think, especially when it’s about her,” she continues. “And then there’s me. My power’s shit. Obviously.” 

“But what would you be being punished for?”

Alisha props herself up on her elbow so she can see if he’s serious, but he is. He’s watching her perfectly earnestly, brow a little furrowed.

“For … the way I am,” she says. She hasn’t put tried to put this thought in words before, exactly. “For the way I treat people. The way I use them. And I’m a bitch.”

“You keep saying that,” he says. “But I don’t think you are.”

She lies flat again, huffing out a laugh. “I’ve said and done awful shit to you. Some of it literally tonight.”

“Yeah,” he says. “You have a temper, and you’re impulsive, and you’re absolutely incapable of putting away your breakfast dishes —”

“Nice,” she says.

“— but you’ve also risked your life, loads of times, for all of us. Including me. Alisha,” he says. “You hit a madman with a fire extinguisher for me. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

Always so fucking sincere. It overwhelms her, sometimes.

“I thought my power might be a punishment, at first,” he says. “It hurt so much the first few times I went invisible. Like a seizure.” 

He’s never talked about this. Alisha rolls onto her side and he rolls onto his, so they’re facing each other, wrapped up in their separate sheets. 

“I thought,” he goes on, voice so low it’s near a whisper, “that it was a way of showing me. So many times I felt like I was invisible; well, this is what it was really like. It was worse than I thought. And that was what I got for — for what I’d done.” 

Alisha rolls her eyes. “Pretty sure that bloke whose house you set fire to had it coming.”

“Well, the cat didn’t, though,” he objects. “But not for just the fire. For everything. The staring and the. All of it.” The being generally creepy, she guesses. “But I don’t think that’s what it is anymore.” 

“Then what do you think?” she asks.

“I don’t think … I don’t think it’s meant to show us anything,” he says. “I think it’s just meant to be power.”

“So then why are all the powers complete shit?” Alisha asks, half joking and half really not.

“I think the storm found something in each of us,” Simon says slowly, “something that makes up a big part of how we think about ourselves. And it made those things bigger, because that’s its nature.” He’s really thought about this. She supposes he always was the only one of them that bothered to ask these questions. “And now that it’s given us those powers, it’s on us to use them, to help people. That’s why it picked us to get the powers at all. But it wasn’t out to teach us anything with the kind of power it gave us.” 

Alisha fiddles a little with the hem of her sheet. She doesn’t like where this conversation is going anymore. “I don’t think it has to have given us our powers for a reason,” she says. “You’re talking like the storm’s a person, but it’s just a storm. It doesn’t think anything.”

Simon looks doubtful. “It’s a storm that hands out superpowers, though,” he says. “Not a regular storm.”

“But it doesn’t have a mind,” Alisha reasons. She closes her eyes, trying to follow the thought. “Maybe it did what it did it to us … not because it was fate or whatever bullshit. And not to punish us, either. But just because we were there.”

When she opens her eyes Simon’s watching her intently. She tries a smile. “Does that sound completely stupid?”

“No,” he says. “You’re always smart.” And where the fuck did he get that idea, she wonders. “It just sounds a little depressing.”

“Is it?” she asks. “I don’t think so. I think it means it doesn’t matter what we do with our powers, as long as we’re not hurting anyone.”

“But it’s not just the storm, though, is it?” he says. “It’s the loop. There’s a reason we got these powers, and there’s a reason I go back, too.” 

“Yeah, there was a reason you went back, and you took care of it,” says Alisha. “It’s over now. You don’t have to do it again.” 

He frowns. “That’s not how loops work. You have to keep going back over and over again, every time you reach the turning point. It’s _Terminator 1_ —”

“Look,” she says, a little bit desperate, “if the amount of times someone goes back for something makes it important, then Curtis breaking up with his ex-girlfriend must be the most important thing to ever happen in the universe, the amount of times he says he looped around to it.”

In the warm darkness of the room she can see him grin at that. He doesn’t smile with teeth that often, either him. It’s nice. 

“I think,” he says after a moment, “that you’re very beautiful, and that’s the main thing most people see when they look at you. And then they don’t bother to look closer. And you know that. And the storm found that, and it made it bigger. But that doesn’t say anything about who you are.” He comes in very close to her, close enough that if she just bent her head a little they’d be touching noses. “You don’t deserve any of this,” he says. “None of it.” 

She bites her lip and pulls her sheet up over her hand until it’s made a sort of mitten, and then she reaches over to his set of blankets and tugs and prods at him until she’s got his arm. Rolls over and settles her back against his chest through the blankets and wraps his arm around her so that he’s spooning her. 

She feels him take an unsteady breath, and then his face nudging around near the back of her head. In her hair, she supposes. 

It’s very nice, lying tucked up in his arms like that. She could drift off to sleep very easily. Her thoughts start to go fuzzy around the edges, but there was something else she wanted to say to him. “Maybe it’s not a punishment,” she says, and hears her voice starting to go croaky with sleep. “But I don’t think it’s about destiny or deserving, either. Or me deserving better than you. Or me being trapped with you.”

He hums in her ear, a little doubtful. “You’re asleep,” he says.

“I mean you and me,” she insists drowsily. “It doesn’t have to be because we’re stuck in a loop, or because we’re so awful we deserve each other. It could just be because we fancy each other.” 

He murmurs something in her ear. But she’s already too close to sleep to hear it.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s actually a little bit better between them, after that night they lay in bed and talked about what their powers were for. 

Alisha feels like that doesn’t make sense, like they should have talked more. He spied on her. She assaulted him. That’s the kind of shit you’re supposed to talk out, yeah? 

At the very least, she should probably tell him something about how he’s wrong, she’s not just with him because his future, much fitter self told her she would be. But that would be a lie, probably, and she can’t do that to him either. 

It would probably be a lie. Certainly she never had any interest in Simon before she saw what he was going to grow into. She doesn’t think she did, anyway — but the fact is, she’s fucked weirder blokes before, when the mood struck her. When she needed an ego lift. During that whole Cock Monster phase she even got a bit into fucking the weird ones because they were always so grateful, and she tended to like the self-esteem boost when she knew the entire school was calling her a Cock Monster. Also it was less pressure than the handsome ones. She could be as weird and messy as she liked when she was in bed with a freak.

So it’s not strictly speaking impossible she might not have fucked Simon if she felt like it, even when he was at his most awkward and starey. For the story, or to see if she could make him stare at her in an interesting way, or to see what kind of bizarre shit would come out of his mouth if she used her power on him. And who knows what might have happened next.

It’s just as likely, she thinks sometimes, that he wouldn’t have been interested in her if she hadn’t told him they would be together. He knows she’s out of his league and that he’s lucky she’s spending her time on him, and he’s grateful. But that doesn’t mean he would have wanted her if she hadn’t told him to want her.

Anyway. She turns it over in her head for a while and then she decides they don’t need to talk about it at all, and Simon certainly seems to agree, because he doesn’t try to bring it up either.

All the same it’s like there’s something lighter between them, like they’ve both decided without saying anything that they can stop pretending about something she hadn’t quite realized she was pretending about. Like: He’s not quite so afraid of her, now. And she feels a little less as though she’s got to protect him from something. 

He’s still doing that fucking parkour, though, and she can’t stop thinking she’s got to protect him from that. It’s awful. 

But he’s also starting to get fit, and she has to admit she doesn’t mind that part of things.

The others are noticing, too. One night at the bar when Simon’s off buying a round, Kelly says neutrally, “Simon’s looking well,” and Nikki says, “You’re getting him proper fit, aren’t you? Good for you,” and then Nathan asks her if she’s forcing Barry into some sadistic weight lifting program because she refuses to date anyone who isn’t a near-Olympic athlete. Then Curtis calls him a prick and Nikki hits him, so it isn’t all bad. 

*

Simon has another idea about sex. Which she doesn’t even have to claw out of him, thank god: he brings it up himself one night when she’s getting ready for bed. 

“I was thinking about your power,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching her while she unpins her hair and takes off her jewelry. He’s still fully dressed, his cheeks pink but his eyes firm on hers. He’s getting better about the eye contact thing, too. “And I mean — it’s not touch that triggers it, really, is it?”

She frowns at him, undoing her earrings. “Pretty sure it is, Simon,” she tells him.

“Well no, but it isn’t, exactly,” he insists. “It’s skin.”

She tilts her head to one side, still not getting it, and his cheeks pinken further. “Look, could you come here? Please?” he asks.

She still has no idea what he’s talking about, but she likes the slight urgency in his voice, likes the way his eyes are going dark as they track her movements. She takes her time walking over to where he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on a little bit of a show, swaying her hips a tiny bit more than necessary. “All right?” she asks him.

“Yeah,” he says, and puts his hands on her hips, over her skirt, and tugs.

She sits down on his lap more out of surprise than out of anything else — it’s an awkward motion, he isn’t really sure of her weight or how to move her — but then he’s holding her firmly against himself, shifting his weight and rearranging things until — oh. 

Touch, but not skin. _That’s_ what he meant.

“Is this —” he stammers, arching underneath her without seeming to mean to, “—is this okay —”

She can feel him hardening against her. She grinds down, feels her eyes start to slip shut and widens them instead. She wants to see his face for this.

“Yes,” she says, winding her arms around his neck over the collar and tightening her knees around his hips. “Yes, this is —” She grinds down against him again and watches him gasp and his mouth go slack. 

“Oh god,” he says, voice desperate, “oh _god_.” 

She laughs with too much breath, scrabbling in his lap, trying to get closer, trying to feel everything she can. His hands are biting into her hips now; she wants them everywhere.

“Touch me,” she commands, “touch —” and takes his clothed wrists and drags his hands up her waist, to her breasts.

“Fuck,” he says. His hands hover, helpless, and then he lets them dip down and cup her, eyes steady on her face. 

“Like that,” she murmurs, “that’s good.” She’s settling into a rhythm against him now, a little less desperate scrambling and a little more finesse. God, she hasn’t dry humped a boy in _years_ , no wonder it had never occurred to her before as an option, it’s so — well. It’s so Year Nine, isn’t it? 

Except it isn’t now. It isn’t at all. It’s Simon’s cock hard against her thigh; Simon’s hip hitting her clit every time she grinds down; it’s Simon’s hands on her breast and his thumbs starting to stroke cautiously over her nipples, only her top and her bra between his hands and her skin; it’s not quite enough but it’s so much more than she’s had in so long. He pushes back up against her.

“That’s it,” she says. “You’re doing really well.” 

He makes a pained, helpless sound and something in her heart twists. Without thinking she leans forward, moving to press her forehead against his, and he jerks back, going still between her legs.

She freezes. Her heart thumps. 

“Sorry,” he says. “We just — have to be careful —”

“Yeah,” she says, “yeah, okay,” and starts moving again, and he lets out a long, shuddering sigh and pushes his hips up to meet hers. 

He’s moving a little awkwardly still but he’s trying to follow her, working to match her movement. Really, he just needs practice and he’ll be so good at this, this could be so good. One of his hands goes up to her hair and brushes it back from her face, so delicately, pushing it back from her eyes and tucking it behind her ears, careful not to touch skin. He’s been watching her eyes this whole time, entranced, but now his gaze is flicking desperately down to her mouth.

“I want to kiss you,” he says, which is the first time this him has ever said he wants to do anything to her without her touching his skin and making him say it first. “I want to, so much — Alisha —”

“Yes,” she gasps, “yes, anything you want,” which isn’t true at all, not even close, but it would be nice if it were. It feels true.

He shudders, and then he leans in and his jaw bangs clumsily against the side of her head, against her hair. He kissed her head, she realizes, and that thing in her heart feels swollen, too big. 

“Simon,” she says desperately. She runs her hand up his clothed chest, follows the lovely curve of muscle there up to his shoulder, his throat, skims up to his hair. She’s moving harder against him now, almost furiously, knocking puffs of air out of herself with every move, but she makes her hand on his hair as gentle as she can. 

It’s too rough, like no one ever told him about conditioner. Him with all his fastidious habits. Her future boy’s hair was softer; maybe she’s meant to teach him about proper haircare along with sex? She can; she can do such a good job with him; she can be so careful and teach him so well; and before she knows what she’s doing she’s burying her head in his chest and pressing kisses along his shoulder, and he is shivering and pulling her closer and his hands are like iron around her waist. 

He comes before she does, with a choked sound in the back of his throat and his face craned away from her. “Don’t stop,” she tells him, and he does what she tells him, like always. Keeps moving his hips as she pushes back hard against him, as she pulls his hands back up to her breasts and arches into them, as she works one hand under the waist of her skirt and her panties to her clit until finally — there, there, yes, that’s it, and she comes gasping, her other hand screwed tight into his collar.

Afterwards, he gets up to change out of his trousers. Always so tidy. When he comes back in his pajamas he falls onto his back on the bed and she sprawls out on top of him, and his hands find a shaky space on her back where her top covers most of her skin. 

“That was a good idea,” she tells him. 

“I’m full of them,” he says, which is the kind of joke he’s starting to make more these days. She likes it. The other him hardly ever joked. 

She stretches out more and settles against him. Her outfit doesn’t cover that much, but he’s covered collar to wrist to ankle like he always is, and she’s not in any danger of touching skin like this. “Do you want me to cover up more?” she asks him idly. “For this touch-no-skin thing?”

“No,” he says at once, his hands continuing to stroke unhurried circles across the fabric of her shirt.

She smiles into his chest, thinking of his eyes on her legs, the tops of her breasts, her bare arms. When she catches him watching now he doesn’t try to hide it right away; it’s much nicer than when he creeps around trying to stare behind her back. But she wants to hear him say it. “Why not?” she asks.

What he says isn’t what she was expecting. “I used to think that you probably would eventually,” he says. “When we first got our powers. There are loads of characters in comic books whose powers are triggered by someone touching their skin — Rogue in _X-Men_ , that sort of thing.” She has no idea what sort of thing he means. “Usually they wear long gloves. Cover themselves up as much as they can. I expected you’d do something like that after a while.” 

She props her chin up so she can look at him. He’s staring up at the ceiling, hands still moving slowly across her back, but when she raises her head he looks down and meets her eyes. “When you didn’t,” he goes on, “I couldn’t understand it at first. It seemed like asking for trouble to me. But then after a while I thought — well, your power takes so much away from you, doesn’t it?” His hand moves up to the low line of her collar, and he traces one finger across it. “But it doesn’t take this,” he concludes. “It doesn’t take who you are. Because you don’t let it. It’s like you’re saying _fuck you_ to it every day.”

Alisha feels her cheeks warm. “It’s only clothes,” she says. “Not like I picked them out to make a point or anything. I just like them.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Even after what your power did to you. I think it’s brave. I think you’re brave.” 

No one ever says shit like that to her. Not even her _dad_ , who tells her she’s a princess every single day of her life, has ever said that she’s brave. She rolls off him and props herself up on an elbow next to him so she can see his face better. “I didn’t know you thought about things like that,” she says. “Before we started this.” 

“Didn’t you?” He sounds shy, but also a little amused. Rolls over to face her and plays with a lock of her hair. “Well, I did. I thought about you a lot. I still do.” 

A memory echoes through her head, _I think about you. Not just since you —_ and she cringes internally. Jesus, that time with the shape-shifter when he’d asked her out. He’d been so fucking terrified, and it had all seemed so completely disgusting to her.

“Well, I knew _that_ ,” she says brashly, to cover the memory, and startles a real laugh out of him. “Obviously. Everyone thinks about me. But I thought it was just normal pervy shit.”

“That too, probably,” he agrees. “But also just you. You’re interesting to me.” 

“I’m _interesting_?” she says with delight.

He blushes but doesn’t look away. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re fascinating.”

“Hmm,” she says, and fiddles with his collar. “I think about you,” she tells him. 

He does look away at that, eyes closing like he can’t bear the thought of it. Quaint as a maiden fucking aunt. “You do?” he says at last.

“Mmhm,” Alisha says. “I think about what you would look like with this undone,” and she slips his top button out of its hole.

His eyes flutter open and he frowns down at his open collar, and then at her. “With my — my pajama collar open?”

“Yeah,” says Alisha, and does the next button, and then the next. “Not just your pajamas, though.” She can see the whole line of his throat now, and she watches as he swallows, and swallows again. “Is that all right?”

It’s hardly scandalous, just showing a bit of throat. Simon has immaculate habits but surely even he can’t protest this? He’s wavering, he looks lost. 

Then suddenly his face sharpens and goes alert. He’s landed on an idea. “Did he wear them like that?” he asks.

“Who,” Alisha asks, taken aback, “the other you?” She thinks about it. “You didn’t really wear collars much in front of me,” she says. “You were mostly in that suit.” Or out of it. She turns her attention back to the Simon in front of her. Runs her nail in a neat line around the opening she’s made, pressing hard enough to scratch his skin through the fabric, and grins when he hisses. “Will you leave it like this for me?” she asks him. 

“Yes,” he says, “all right,” and she pushes him back onto the bed and climbs on top of him again.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s almost starting to feel normal. It’s almost like the future he promised her is actually coming true.

Simon turns out to be a fucking savant for how to have sex without touching. All that time perving around the internet must have given him ideas that are actually useful; who knew? He puts on cotton gloves and fucks her with her vibrator, trails a feather against her clit, and he hasn’t coughed up any clever ideas that will let her touch him, but when she climbs onto his lap he knows how to move against her now. He’s learning fast, like she knew he would. 

He wears his collars undone now, and his fringe not so neat as he used to. Is even starting to take slightly less shit from Nathan, a turn of events of which Alisha wholeheartedly approves and which has caused Nathan significant dismay.

Kelly beams like a mother duck whenever she sees them together. Even Curtis basically approves at this point. 

“You’re really good for each other, aren’t you?” he asks her during a quiet moment in their shift at the bar one day.

“Oh, so now that everyone sees the hidden depths you don’t think I’ve gone completely mad,” she says. “I was right, he’s really not as weird as you thought, is he?”

“Yeah, but I mean,” says Curtis, “you seem happy.” 

She looks up sharply from the pint glass she’s washing, but he really means it. Sweet fucking Curtis. “I’m glad, that’s all,” he says, and flicks a dishrag at her. 

Her parents even like him. Well, they like the carefully curated selection of details she has presented them with each time she begs out of having them meet in person, because she’s not fucking stupid enough to try bringing him round to theirs just yet. He’d probably faint if she tried suggesting it. But all the things she tells them are true: he’s smart; he’s thinking about going to college; he barely drinks and doesn’t do drugs; he paid for their flat all himself, the whole year’s rent upfront. (That was the future him, but they don’t have to know that.)

They’ve even stopped arguing so much about petty bullshit around the flat. Have relaxed into a pattern where she comes home from the bar and prattles on about what complete aresholes her customers were today and how she’s going to quit tomorrow, she swears, and he listens and laughs and orders takeaway noodles for her, and it’s all so boring and blissful she could just cry.

Really, there are only two problems left.

The first is that as pleasantly inventive as Simon has turned out to be, gloves and vibrators and feathers and dry humping are still no match for skin on skin. She’s not as frustrated as she was before they found their workarounds, but sometimes it’s like she can feel her skin thirsty for contact. Like she’s a desert and she hasn’t felt rain in a century.

Sometimes her hands slip and she touches skin without meaning to. It’s funny, the other people she touches always try to climb on top of her right away, but Simon always just freezes and then blurts out completely bizarre shit — he wants to come on her toes, wear her knickers as a hat, stuff like that. She never has to worry about fighting him off. 

But as soon as she’s not touching him anymore he always runs away from her. Usually goes invisible, too. Can’t face looking her in the eye after whatever he said.

She tries not to think about how she could just touch his skin accidentally-on-purpose one time and take care of all this bullshit. Touch all the skin she likes and ride him until the craving stops. Gag him if she has to. Wouldn’t that be a pretty sight.

She doesn’t always succeed at not thinking that.

The second problem is that he’s still doing that fucking parkour. Comes home covered with cuts and bruises all the time, and she can’t even patch them up for him. Nathan has started to ask her accusingly if she’s a wife beater. 

She finally brings herself to ask him about why he’s doing it, just once, as he puts on his hoodie and heads off for another exciting day of throwing himself off roofs. “You’re getting really good at this,” she says, and then, “But you’re not seriously planning to go back in time, though,” not quite daring to make it a question.

He glances back at her like he doesn’t get it. “I told you,” he says, “it has to be like this,” and it takes her a moment to work out that he’s quoting his other self when he says that. Then she wants to argue with him, but he’s already walking away and shutting the door to the lift behind him. 

End of conversation. Like it’s that simple for him.

Does he not understand that if he actually goes and does everything the other him did, he’s going to die? How can he be so cavalier about it?

Maybe because he didn’t have to burn his body. 

She wishes there was a way she could tell for sure that he’s wrong, that their present isn’t the other him’s past. But he told her sweet fuck-all about his past. Even when she asked direct questions, he found a way to dodge! Always so fucking mysterious. “Comes with the territory,” he said, trying not to laugh at her. 

He let a couple of things slip. But the fame thing turned out to be a dead end. 

There was that time she asked him how he could touch her, and he just said, “Things are different in the future.” 

That hasn’t happened yet. Maybe that’s something she can still change. 

*

The thing about her bullshit power is it affects more things than you would think.

Alisha misses sex, of course. But there are other things, too.

She misses being able to dance at a club without having to be careful where her hands go. She misses being able to get on a crowded bus without getting worried about what will happen if someone jostles her. 

She hasn’t hugged her parents since the day of the storm. Which doesn’t bother her, mostly: it’s not like they’re a fucking sitcom family. She was never that big on hugs to begin with.

But it’s fucking exhausting to dodge them everytime she sees them. They always seem to be reaching out to her: her mum wants to pluck a stray thread off her top and fix her hair; her dad wants to squeeze her cheeks and pat her on her head. “My princess is getting too grown up for me,” he says every time she won’t let him, aiming for mock hurt but ending up on real hurt instead.

So she doesn’t see them that often. Easier now that she’s moved in with Simon. Still, it would be nice, she thinks sometimes, to be able to hug her mum and dad again.

It would be nice also not to have the thoughts in her head she gets, about all the things she could do with her power. The things she could do to Simon, if she got her hands on him fast enough. 

She isn't going to do them, probably. She knows how fucked up it would be if she did. But it would be nice if she didn’t have to keep thinking about how she could do them if she wanted to.

*

She doesn’t think about it that long when she starts to see the Cash for Power signs around the estate. She sees them once, twice, three times, and then it’s just: _Sign me the fuck up._

*

“Kiss me,” she tells Simon, and he does, so, so, so carefully. It’s the gentlest thing, just his mouth brushing over hers, soft and warm and just barely open, and then he’s pulling back and looking at her for approval. Eyes giant.

He’s barely kissed anyone before her, she’s pretty sure. Jessica, maybe one or two other girls. He’s got a little bit of an idea about what he’s doing but not much of one. His hands are fluttering over her back like little birds. He’s so nervous he’ll do the wrong thing.

Her heart is tender and too big, and there are bubbles of giddiness in her chest. She feels physically lighter now that her power’s gone. Like she could float all the way to the top of their Christmas tree.

It’s all gone right now. That power was going to devour her whole life if she let it, and now it’s gone. And this will fix everything: he’s not going to go back and die, because this didn’t happen in her future boy’s timeline. So everything they’re doing right now means he’s going to stay here with her, learning all the ways there are to touch her, just like he said he would.

She goes up on her tiptoes and kisses him again, a little more firmly than he kissed her, showing him how this works: tilting her head so their noses don’t get in the way, brushing her tongue softly against his, plucking at his lower lip a little with hers the way her future boy had always liked. He gasps, and then he pushes her coat off of her shoulders, dragging his hands slow and deliberate. The way he always is with her. She didn’t even have to teach him that; he just knew.

She pulls off his jumper, runs her hands up his chest. God, his skin still feels exactly the same: clean and too rough, like he’s scrubbed too hard with soap. She tosses the jumper away and presses in harder against him, so when he wraps his arms back around her he’s covering all of her and she feels tiny and precious against him. He’s not that much taller than she is but his shoulders are broad enough that it works. 

He pushes down the straps of her coveralls. Passes his hands slowly over her back, her shoulders, and then up to her face. “You feel …” he breathes against her mouth, tracing wondering lines with his fingertips along her jaw, under her ear, her earlobe.

She feels drugged. It’s going to be exactly the way it was before, when he would touch her so slowly and so carefully that she would be ready to scream for it by the end. 

“You too,” she says. Kisses him just a little bit deeper than before, pushing her tongue into his mouth, until he makes a helpless sound against her. Walks him back to the bed. When his knees hit the edge he sits down, and she climbs onto his lap and he gazes up at her while she pulls off her jumper and her bra, and it’s exactly the same as the first time. Exactly. It’s all going to be just the way it was before.

“Touch me,” she tells him, and brings his hands up to her breasts while she kisses his throat.

His hands are shaking, and he makes a choked sort of sound that doesn’t have any words. He tries to cup her breasts, draw circles around her nipples, but even though he’s done this before through a layer of shirt, his hands seem clumsier than usual this time. Clutching her a little too hard, not quite sure of what to do.

He’s overwhelmed. Which he wasn’t before, really, even when she was. He always knew exactly what he was doing to her before. But of course he wouldn’t this time, yet.

That’s all right, Alisha decides. It doesn’t have to be exactly the way it was to be good, still, to be really good. She drags her mouth back up to his and kisses him and runs her nails down his back, and he gasps, “Oh, _fuck_.” So surprised by it. _Sweetheart_ , Alisha thinks.

“Take this off me,” she tells him, and pulls his hands down to the waist of her coveralls. He swallows hard and pulls them down, caressing her thighs, her shins, her calves. His hands are still shaking. He’s trying to keep moving slowly for her, but he’s about at his limit, she thinks.

She pushes him flat to his back and kisses him sweetly this time, dipping her mouth over his, gently as she can. He runs his hands up her back, her shoulders, and then up to her collarbone, and he just touches her there, eyes shut tight, like he’s astonished by her clavicle, while she undoes his trousers and pulls them down along with his boxers. Then she takes him in her palm and he hisses and his hands dig into her shoulders.

Fuck, he’s got such a good cock and he’s hardly let her see it at all in all the time they’ve been living together. He’s not much longer than average but he’s thick and he has a good feel in her hand and he’s hard as iron right now. She runs the tip of one finger over the head, just gently, just teasing a little, and then he flinches away from her as though she’s hurt him. ”Stop,” he says.

Alisha’s jaw drops in shock; he’s never wanted her to stop touching him before. She feels bad about it immediately, because he looks ashamed as soon as he sees her face, but she can’t help it.

“Sorry,” he says. “I just — I wasn’t ready —”

“That’s all right,” she says.

Truth be told, Alisha wouldn’t hate some more active participation at this point. He’s being so passive, she feels almost as though she’s ravishing him. But this is the part he doesn’t really know how to do yet, isn’t it, and she can teach him. She can.

She gets up to pull off her panties and her long socks herself, and he stares up at her wide-eyed, propped up on his elbows, naked and waiting for her. “I want it to be good for you,” he tells her, voice thick, like each word costs him. That thing in her heart twists. “I want to be good for you, Alisha —”

She climbs back on top of him and kisses him. “This is good —” she assures him, pushing him back down to the mattress, “— you’re doing really well —” and she gets him against her entrance and sinks down over him.

His eyes squeeze shut and he arches up against her. “ _God_ ,” he says, like he’s in pain.

“Mmhmm,” she agrees. 

She takes a second to let herself adjust. It’s been quite a few months now, and this might hurt a little, but she doesn’t think she’ll mind the pain. In fact — she starts rocking against him — suddenly that seems perfect, exactly what she needs. Something so slow and so hard that it hurts, to wake all her senses up and let it sink in that she finally did it, she’s finally found a way out of that absolute fucking nightmare of a power, she’s finally found a way to fuck her stupid beautiful boyfriend. 

Except he’s not stupid, he’s actually dead smart, and he’s got no idea at all what he’s doing but this can still be so good. His hands are running all over her now, squeezing clumsily along her shoulder blades and her arse and her ribs, and he is hard and throbbing inside her as she works herself on top of him and —

“Oh fuck,” says Simon suddenly, in tones of mounting horror. He starts to push her away, but then his hands seem to be clutching her closer, and as she freezes, trying to figure out what he wants her to do, he repeats, “Oh fuck fuck fuck,” and then shouts and arches against her.

Oh, Alisha thinks. _Oh._ Oh, well, shit, that’s embarrassing. 

What the fuck does she do now? Every time she’s been in this situation before she’s just made fun of the guy and cut her losses. Somehow that doesn’t seem like quite the sort of response Simon will appreciate.

She checks his face for some sort of cue. He’s got his eyes squeezed shut and a forearm flung over his face. Like he thinks if he doesn’t see her it didn’t really happen. 

Oh no, he’s really upset.

“Babe,” she says, aiming for affectionate and reassuring, and bends down to kiss his cheek, but he flinches away from her. Eyes still shut. 

It stings a little. She’s not used to rejection, especially when she’s trying to make someone feel better. She doesn’t bother to do that very often, and she’d appreciate a little appreciation of her efforts. Also she is so fucking frustrated right now. But he looks utterly mortified, and that feels worse than all the rest of it.

Sighing inwardly, she climbs off him and curls up at his side, trying to twine their legs together. At once he sits up, shrugging her away, and props his arms up over his legs. Stares dead ahead with an expression of pure misery.

Oh, poor Simon. Poor sweetheart. She should never have tried to move that fast with him, of course he got overwhelmed, what was she thinking? “It doesn’t matter,” she tells him. 

When he still doesn’t say anything she sits up, tries to put her arms around him. “Simon,” she says. “Look at me.”

“He was much better than me, wasn’t he?”

*

After he goes invisible she collapses back onto the bed, feeling dull and exhausted. 

Her thighs are still sticky with his come. She should clean up. Maybe change these sheets. They’re filthy. That’s the sort of thing that bothers him. 

Or maybe he should change the sheets, if it bothers him so much. Maybe he should be the one cleaning everything up and taking care of her, instead of getting jealous of himself ( _what_ ) and creeping invisibly about the flat. Maybe he should at least have come back to bed and had a go touching her, even if he doesn’t want to deal with the rest of it. Even if he doesn’t want to deal with her going way too fast and way too hard, despite all that shit she told herself about how she would take care of him and teach him everything he needs to know.

Fuck. Is it all her fault?

It’s the first night she hasn’t had to worry about her power since that fucking storm and she feels shittier than she has in months. 

After about ten minutes she decides Simon isn’t coming back to bed anytime soon, so she gets up and showers herself clean. She rubs her skin with her favorite lotion and briefly considers putting on a bit of a show in case he’s watching her — but no, no, she’s done wanking herself off in front of other people for a bit. Not when she’s got other options. 

Instead she goes back to the bed and strips off the sheets from her side, where they’re the worst, and then rolls them into a ball and tosses them to a corner. His sheets made it through relatively unscathed, so she unfolds the overlap from where he’s tucked them in at the center of the mattress, neat and precise, and spreads them triumphantly across the whole bed.

She doesn’t need a hospital cornered barrier between her skin and her boyfriend’s, thank you. She can sleep in a bed with just one set of sheets again, like a normal fucking person, and she can spoon her boyfriend whenever she likes without worrying. If he ever shows up again.

She puts herself into bed and lies on her side, facing away from his side of the bed. “This is the first night in a really long time where I can touch anyone, Simon,” she says out loud. “Please don’t make me spend it by myself.”

There’s a long quiet, and she wonders if maybe she got it wrong, and he wasn’t listening after all. But then she hears sheets rustle and the mattress dips, and then he’s pushing up against her, wrapping his arm around her ribs, tucking his legs behind hers and his face into her hair. “Sorry,” he whispers, indistinctly. 

She takes his arm and pulls it more firmly against her, curling back against him. He’s in his pajamas and she’s not wearing anything, and there’s a low and comforting warmth everywhere bare skin touches: his hand on her ribs and her hand over his wrist, his feet a little too cold against hers, his nose against her neck. 

“We didn’t use anything,” he says miserably into her neck. “I didn’t think.”

Oh god, and he’s been off obsessing about that, on top of everything? “I’ve got an IUD,” she says. “We can get tested or something if you like. It’s fine.” 

He doesn’t say anything to that. 

“I don’t want you to disappear on me like that every time you’re upset,” she adds. “It’s okay if you need space or want to think or whatever, but just tell me first, yeah?”

“I didn’t go anywhere,” he says. “I was right here the whole time.”

That’s not what she meant, and it doesn’t make the disappearing better, but at least he doesn’t sound like he’s about to cry anymore. 

Should she say anything more about it? They didn’t resolve anything, and that’s what you do in relationships, isn’t it, you try to resolve the conflict. Chloe read this whole book about it once and it was all she’d talk about at brunch for a month afterwards. Boring as fuck.

Alisha doesn’t think she can take saying anything else about it just now. She’s pretty sure he can’t either.

“This is nice,” she whispers instead, rubbing her thumb against the pulse point of his wrist. “This is something I’ve been thinking about.” 

He doesn’t say anything to that, and she lets her eyes drift shut. And then: “I’m glad,” he says suddenly and fiercely against her shoulders, “I’m glad you got rid of your power. You didn’t deserve that, not ever.” 

He’s so sure of that. Also so sure that they got their powers for a reason. Which one is it, she wants to ask him sometimes.

It still warms her, to hear him say that. It’s like there’s something tight inside her, and it’s been screwed up fast for so long she doesn’t notice anymore, and then when he says that it melts sweetly loose inside of her and all of a sudden she can breathe better. 

“Simon,” she tells him, “you’re a good boyfriend.”


	6. Chapter 6

It doesn’t feel great to lie to Simon but it doesn’t feel like completely the wrong thing to do either.

Their lives have been such shit since they got their powers, and now they have the chance to get rid of them. Who wouldn’t jump on that? Simon, that’s who.

He thinks he has a destiny, and he doesn’t care that it ends with him bleeding out in her arms. Well, she cares. She didn’t sign up to date a dead superhero. If she has to tell a little constructive white lie to get him on board with that, then so be it.

God, he believes her so easily, though. It’s like lying to a little kid. Whatever comes out of her mouth he thinks is the truth. He trusts her that much.

But after he sells his power and comes out with his wad of cash like the rest of them, she stops worrying so much about whether she’s betraying his trust or whatever, because it’s all going to be all right now. It’s like she’s finally left community service and all the murder and rubbish and generally horrifying bullshit behind her, and she’s taken all the good parts with her. 

The group. Actual friendships, at least with everyone but Nathan. 

Simon. 

And now she can actually touch him. 

“You just need practice,” she tells him when they get back to the flat, and leads him by the hand to the bed.

His eyes are wary as he follows her there, but she’s thought it through this time. Simon’s not the only one who can make a plan. Alisha’s actually very good at making sex plans, when she bothers to. And what other kind of plan is worth making?

“Slower this time, yeah?” she tells him, sitting down cross-legged on the mattress. He copies her, leaving a little space between them, and she leans across it to kiss him soft and gentle, no hurry this time. She brings her hand up to his jaw and traces her fingers along it to the corner and then just feels it, the sharp angle there, and the vulnerable slope to his throat underneath.

Simon makes a confused sound in the back of his throat. Her poor weird boy. He has no idea what he’s doing; she has to show him. Filled with a determined tenderness, she kisses him a little firmer, stroking her tongue against his, and he yields to her, opening his mouth, letting her sink into him.

She wants to be closer now, but she doesn’t want to go too fast again, so she compromises. Gets up on her knees so they’re right against his, and winds her arms around his neck, stroking the short hairs at the nape of his neck, the smooth skin there.

When he brings his hands up to her face, they’re shaking. He brushes her hair back from her face; cups her cheek, her jaw; he’s breathing hard against her mouth. 

“All right?” she asks, pulling back, leaning her forehead against his.

He nods fast, kisses her like he can’t help it. “Your skin,” he says, “it’s so soft.” 

She feels that thing in her heart expanding and kisses him back before she says something stupid, coaxing his tongue into her mouth and fisting her hands into his hair, pulling him closer, closer. He’s up on his knees now, too, kissing her desperately, and she pulls her mouth away from his, trails kisses along his jaw, down that slope to the tender skin of his throat, pulling his collar open and watching as he swallows and swallows. 

_Too fast_ , she hears in her head, so she makes herself pause there, pressing her head into the open V of his collar and breathing. He pets her hair back from her head again; strokes along her hairline to her ears. Holds one of her earlobes between curious fingers, strokes his fingers down her throat, and then he hits that one spot above her collar bone and she shivers. 

He freezes. Then brushes his finger over it again, light enough almost to tickle, and she shivers again.

“Oh,” he whispers, and then he’s craning his neck down so he can kiss her there, so intently, concentrating so hard, and she arches up against him and clutches his head to her throat. 

“That’s good,” she says into his ear, “just like that,” and she feels him writhe a little against her just before he bites down on her neck and she cries out. 

Then she can’t bear it anymore. She hauls his head back up so she can kiss him and sinks back onto the bed, pulling him down with her until he’s kneeling over her as he kisses her, right hand still tracing circles around that spot he’s found on her neck. He’s smiling against her mouth now, just a little bit smug, so in the spirit of payback she traces her way to that point below his left ear, right where his jugular is pulsing, and she licks him there, making it as dirty as she can.

He gasps, and his left hand convulses around her waist, and she grins and pushes him back up so she can undo the buttons of his shirt, kissing each new patch of skin with every button she undoes.

“But how did you,” he breathes in her ear, “how did you know —?”

It takes her a second to grasp the question. How did she know he would like that so much, when he probably didn’t know himself. “You always liked it before,” she says, and pushes him back so she can pull the shirt off his arms. 

She regrets it as soon as the words are out of her mouth. His face falls, and he stops moving. Stupid, this was what set him off last night, can’t she even remember that? It’s just that she can’t always keep it straight these days, which him is which. And if she can’t, how can he possibly be jealous? It’s all him, isn’t it? 

“Simon,” she starts to say, and then his face rearranges into something determined, and he tosses the shirt aside, kisses her with a certain amount of purpose, pulling off her top, and pushes her flat onto her back to the bed.

Well, okay, it’s not what she came up with in her sex plan, but if this makes him feel better she isn’t opposed. He’s kissing a line down her neck, now, and then down her chest, not even bothering to take off her bra, mouthing hot and messy against her skin through the fabric. 

Down to her stomach. And then further down.

 _Oh thank god_ , she thinks. Her future boy had never needed any encouragement from her to do this, but she wasn’t sure about this Simon. He might need to be talked into it, she thought, or to work up his nerve. Certainly she wasn’t banking on him going down on her on night one of the sex plan. 

But here he is, moving with a certain amount of single-mindedness. Did he decide that this will be how he gets some self-confidence back after getting jealous of his own self? Because that’s fucking brilliant, if so; if this is what it takes to give him all that secret agent self-assurance the other him had, then Alisha is willing to make that sacrifice for him. He’s kissing down from her navel and onto the front of her skirt, settling himself so that his shoulders are between her legs, sliding one hand up under her skirt to her inner thigh, using the other to — to reach for his pocket? What the fuck?

 _Maybe a dental dam_ , she thinks wildly, he did have that whole freakout last night about them not using any protection — but oh god, is there anything less sexy; and she tries to find enough brain cells to put together to tell him that if it bothers him that much they might as well just wait to get tested, because she’s not getting oral through plastic. 

But at the last minute he seems to think better of it, because he doesn’t take anything out of his pocket after all, thank god. Instead he undoes the zipper of her skirt and pulls it down, and she wriggles upright enough to peel out of her tights and her panties.

He looks sharply up at her face, at that, like he wants to make sure she’s on board here, and she takes a deep breath and hopes she doesn’t look like she’s begging as she nods. Then he bends his head down and … sort of smells her, which, okay, she always knew Simon was a bit of a freak, and that’s at least a sort of sexy freakishness, she can get on board with that. And then he applies the flat of his tongue to her folds. 

“Oh _god_ ,” Alisha says, and covers her face with her hands.

He shudders between her legs in response as he licks her open. Works his tongue inside her. Slow at first, and then more sure, more eager. 

It’s so good. A mess, but still so fucking good. 

He’s a little bit clumsy and his nose bumps awkwardly against her pelvis. But he’s watched her getting herself off enough by now that he knows more or less how hard she wants to be touched, and where. And his hands are so gentle and strong, holding her thighs apart, and his mouth is hot and soft and determined against her. She threads her fingers through his too-rough hair. “Yeah,” she tells him. “Yes.”

He’s focused on her opening at first, circling around it, slipping his tongue up and inside her, but after a few minutes he abandons it. Licks up, slow and tentative, like he’s looking for something. She nudges his head to the right spot, keeping her hands gentle, and sighs as he finds her clit. “Good,” she tells him, “right there, that’s good, that’s good,” and she hears her voice going higher and higher as he sweeps his tongue across it.

She pulls her knees up, draping her legs across his shoulders, giving him more space, and he makes a wanting sound as he licks and licks and licks at her. “Use your hand,” she instructs him, “inside —” and then she sobs for breath as he does what he says, pushing one finger inside of her. He strokes his finger in and out of her, lapping at her clit, and then he adds a second finger and sucks her clit into his mouth. “ _Yes_ ,” she says, and “Simon,” and he makes a desperate sound against her and she clutches his head against her as she comes. 

He knows enough to keep kissing her as she comes down, which surprises her. But then he just stays down there, head cradled in her hips, like maybe he just isn’t really sure he’s allowed to look her in the face right now, and she gets it. So she hauls him up by his shoulders and kisses him, a little too loose and blissed out to be anything but sloppy about it. It really has been a very long time for her. 

He’s smiling against her mouth by the time the kiss ends, but just to be sure he gets it, “That was really fucking good,” she tells him. 

His face lights up; he looks so happy. “Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah,” she says, and traces his mouth with her finger. “You look so neat and tidy but you’ve got such a messy mouth,” she tells him, and kisses that mouth, languorous and slow until he is moaning against her. He’s shaking, breathless, still poised on the edge, and when she reaches down to cup him through his jeans he hisses against her. 

“Sit up,” she instructs, and obediently he sits back on his heels while she undoes his trousers, and then lifts his hips so she can pull them off with his boxers. He is so hard it looks painful, and when she touches him delicately with one finger he squeezes his eyes shut. “Do you want my hand?” she asks. “Or do you want to be inside me?”

His smile dims a bit, and that ashamed look flits across his face again, the one she hates. “I don’t think — I mean, it’ll be quick,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “Do you want to be inside me when you come? Because I’d like that.” 

“I — yes,” he says, “yeah, but I —”

“Good,” she says, “come here,” and lies back down against the pillows, pulling him over her, wrapping her legs around his waist. She’s still wearing her bra, she notices distantly, but she feels too lazy now to do anything about it. Instead she reaches up to push back a lock of Simon’s hair as it falls into his face, and his eyes flutter shut and he kisses her palm and pushes inside of her. 

He’s right, it doesn’t take him long at all to finish. She holds him while he rocks against her, and after a few minutes he tenses and says something inaudible into the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, and she strokes his hair back from his forehead as he comes.

It’s so nice, lying there afterwards, feeling him soften and slip out of her. All that skin touching. Hot and sticky with sweat and come and all the other things you can’t feel when you can’t touch anyone. Disgusting, but in the way she likes sometimes. Alisha wouldn’t mind falling asleep just like this. But she has a sex plan to get back on track. 

“Stay right there,” she tells him, “don’t go anywhere,” and as Simon pulls his head up to gaze blearily at her in confusion, she kisses him on his shoulder and she gets up and out of the bed.

Toilet first. She grabs a wet cloth and towels herself off with it, gets a fresh one, and then heads to the kitchen for a glass of water and a biscuit. She’s always starving after sex. She trundles it all back to the bed, where Simon is giving every indication of being on the brink of going after her.

“I could have got all that,” he protests as she piles everything onto her nightstand, finally remembers to strip off her bra, and climbs back into bed.

“You can next time,” she promises, and hands him the cloth. “Right. Sex 101: afterwards, you always want to clean up and have some water. You can skip it if you’re really tired or if it seems like it would be hotter not to.” 

He’s cleaning himself off, flushing slightly. “Sex 101?” he asks. “Is that what we’re doing?”

“That’s right,” she says, passing him the glass of water and curling herself around him as he drinks it. “And I’m an excellent teacher, so you’ll be getting in a lot of practice with me.”

He looks slightly distracted by her breasts pressing against his shoulder, even though he only just came. Boys. “I’ll do my best to live up to your high standards,” he says, and she presses soft, sweet kisses to his collarbone. “But what’s the biscuit?” he asks.

Alisha sits up straight and snatches the biscuit for herself. “That’s mine,” she says. “You get your own if you want one.”

He looks delighted by that, for some reason. “No,” he says. “I don’t want anything,” so she relaxes back against him again and he wraps his arms around her while she eats her biscuit. It’s very comfortable. 

After a while it pops into her head: “So, what was that in your pocket?” He looks blankly at her, and she clarifies. “Before, when you were about to eat me out. You went to get something out of your pocket.”

Simon’s face turns pink, even though, for fuck’s sake, he just _did it_ to her, so he should be able to hear her _say it_. “Oh,” he says, looking down at his hands. She admires the pretty sweep of his eyelashes against his cheek. “I had a cough sweet.”

This is what she gets for trying to turn a freak into a sex god. “A what?” Alisha asks, and is very proud of herself for keeping a straight face.

Simon stares at his hands some more. “I was talking to Nathan earlier, and he thought —”

Alisha rears back in sheer horror. “You went to _Nathan_ for sex advice?”

“I didn’t know where else to go!” Simon says defensively, but Alisha is unmoved.

“Anywhere else! Literally anywhere else! Go to your _mum_ first — go to _my mum_ first —”

“Christ,” says Simon, looking scandalized, but she keeps going.

“There are seven billion people in this world and all of them would have been more appropriate to go to for _sex advice_ than _Nathan_ , Simon! A nun would have been better!”

“Well,” says Simon, “I didn’t want to ask Curtis.”

Alisha thinks about it and has to admit that’s fair. “Kelly then,” she says grudgingly. 

“Oh god,” says Simon, “she’d pat me on the head.” 

Nikki probably doesn’t even bear thinking about. “Jesus fuck, fine then,” she says, “what did Nathan say?”

Simon bites his lip. “He told me I should put a cough sweet in my mouth, and then —”

“ _Oh my god_ ,” says Alisha. 

“Is that idea actually as bad as it sounds, then?” he asks fretfully.

It sounds like a yeast infection mixed with a burn, but that’s not sexy to say out loud. Even though nothing can ever be sexy again now that she’s had to think about her boyfriend getting _sex advice from Nathan Young_ , Jesus Christ. 

“Probably,” she says, a little helplessly, and then both of them are laughing, just on the edge of hysteria. “I’m glad you didn’t, yeah?” she tells him.

“Yeah,” he says, “me too,” and his eyes go a shade or two darker, like he’s remembering.

Oh, that’s nice, that’s very nice. She can put up with Nathan making unsolicited cameos in her relationship for Simon looking like that at just the thought of going down on her.

She lies back on the pillows, stretching out blissfully, and he lies down next to her, curled up so that they are lying nose to nose. “Do you feel different?” she asks him. “Now that you’ve officially made a girl come all on your own, without anything else?”

He laughs actually out loud at that, which he almost never does. “Yeah, I think I do,” he says. 

Alisha feels a deep and possessive pride blooming in her chest. “I’ve deflowered you,” she tells him. “I’ve stolen your innocence.”

He smiles at her. “Pretty sure that means something else.”

“It should mean this,” she says, and he laughs again.

“Okay,” he says, “then sure,” and brushes his lips very gently against hers. “Thank you,” he murmurs against her mouth.

“For what?” she asks.

“For deflowering me,” he says, still laughing. “You were very tender.”

“That was the plan,” she informs him, and settles her head into the crook of his neck, letting her eyes drift shut. She’s going to sleep so well after all this.

Simon is more awake than she is. He’s playing with her hair, twining one of the curls around his fingers and then letting it bounce free. “You know, I wasn’t sure what to think at first,” he says, voice far away and drowsy, “when you told me we were supposed to sell our powers.”

Alisha opens her eyes, suddenly wide awake. “Yeah?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “But I’ve been thinking. And my future self never went invisible, did he?”

Alisha feels cold all over.

“It would have been so much easier for him,” Simon goes on. “All that running around trying to stay out of our sight — that night I followed him, even if he was leading me to Nikki on purpose, it still would have been easier for him to be invisible during parts of it. I mean, _I_ would have wanted to be invisible. And he’s me. Or will be.” 

Oh god. Oh fuck.

“I didn’t really think of it until you told me,” Simon says. “But it’s all coming together now, isn’t it?”


	7. Chapter 7

She’s seen a lot of terrible shit by now but Nikki dying is one of the worst. That shot and then Nikki on the floor, blood pumping out of her gut, bright black eyes going dark. Turning automatically to Curtis, waiting for him to rewind time so it doesn’t happen, and seeing him realize that he can’t.

And Seth won’t give Curtis his power back again, Simon tells her after he gets back from seeing him with the rest of them. So it’s probably her fault, for telling them all to sell.

“He’ll sell the rest of the powers back,” he says wearily, “but only for twice what we sold them for.”

Simon’s actually doing really well, which she guesses is how he usually is in a crisis. He’s sad more than shaken, and she can see that through the grief he’s already thinking, working out some way to get his power back. Making one of his Simon plans.

Alisha, on the other hand, is a nervous fucking wreck. She likes Nikki, at least as much as she likes any of her ex-boyfriends’ girlfriends. Or at least she thinks Nikki was fun. And she loves Curtis enough that the idea of his grief overwhelms her. 

To lose someone you love like that, right in front of you. To hold them while they stop breathing. She knows exactly what it feels like.

Fucking Simon. He’d stepped in front of her the second that boy took out his gun in the bar, without even thinking about it. Sometimes she thinks it’s like he wants to die for her. Like he’s looking forward to it. 

Well, he isn’t going to. She’s not going to let him. 

She fucks him desperately that night, clinging to his shoulders and trying to tell him with her eyes that he’s not going anywhere. He’s not going to go back and fucking die on her. And he’s holding onto her just as tight, like he knows what she’s afraid of, like he’s afraid of the same thing. Only she’s pretty sure that he isn’t, not at all. 

“What if you disappear one day?” he says suddenly, afterwards, when she’s almost asleep. “What if I don’t go back in time to save you when I’m supposed to and you just vanish from reality? Like in _Back to the Future_.”

She blinks her eyes groggily open. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she says. “You already went back and saved me. You don’t have to do it again. You’re not going to do it again.” 

“I do if you get erased,” he says, “but how will I know when it’s time to go before it’s too late?” Which still doesn’t make any sense at all to her, but she wraps her arms around him and kisses the side of his head.

“That’s not going to happen,” she says, “because you and I have got shit to do, and it doesn’t involve spending our entire lives on this fucking estate.” 

*

When the guy who tells her his name is Jesus touches her, it’s like all the thought leaves her mind at once. Everything’s wiped away, she’s got no self left anymore, and she feels blank and docile, without a single will or wish left except to fuck him. 

That’s what her power felt like, is the first thing she thinks when he pushes her away. That was her power he was using on her, and that’s what it felt like everytime she used it on anyone else. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. 

She feels so disgusting she could cry, and when she gets back to the flat she does, crying in stormy unflattering bursts of tears. She tries to stop when Simon gets back, but she can’t, because he knows. She used her power on him and he knows what it felt like, how fucked up she was to do that, and he still looks at her like she’s incredible.

She tells him she lied to him and it doesn’t even phase him. But then she tells him what the Jesus guy did, how he used her power on her, how she thinks he was behind what happened to Nikki, and he goes calm in that weird creepy way he used to get sometimes when they were in community service, when weird shit was happening and they had to find some way of putting it right, and that way was going to involve more blood than she would like. “I’m going to go kill Jesus,” he tells her, and oh shit, she thinks, she’s in love with him. 

Not the future him, or the idea of him turning into the future him someday. Just this, right now. She loves him. 

It’s terrible.

*

“We need our powers back,” Simon says, and she hates it but he’s not wrong. The storm messed with too many people; there are too many powers floating around the estate now. They can’t deal with them without having a few powers of their own.

But then Kelly, beautiful Kelly, lovely smart brilliant Kelly, says, “Is there any reason we have to get the same powers we had before?” And a whole world of possibilities opens up before Alisha.

Kelly tells Seth she wants to be smart, dead smart so people stop underestimating her, even though right now Alisha’s pretty sure Kelly’s the smartest person she’s ever met. He looks her up and down consideringly and says, “I could do rocket scientist,” and she takes it.

Nathan goes next, scrambling up to the table and yelling, “Make me a millionaire — no, a billionaire! No! Make me a magician, and I’ll make _myself_ a billionaire!” and Seth says, “Jesus,” and takes his hand, and then there’s a flash of light and Seth says, “Magician, are you happy now?”

“Curtis next,” Alisha says, and nods him toward the table, but he shakes his head.

“I dunno,” he says. “If I can’t have my old power back — I don’t know what I want. If it’s not something to bring her back. You two go ahead.”

“Do you want to go next?” Simon asks her. Very chivalrous these days.

“No,” she tells him. “I’m still thinking.”

So Simon walks briskly up to the table and says, without having to think about it at all, “I’d like to be able to see the future, please.”

Alisha’s throat gets tight with panic. It’s not as bad as she was afraid it might be, it’s not something that can get him killed too easily, but it’s not great either. 

He’s still so fixated on what’s going to happen next. On finishing the loop. She wishes he would pick a power that didn’t have anything to do with any of that, time travel or being a superhero or destinies or any of it. The power to play with puppies or something. Or turn into a puppy, like Nathan’s pervert werewolf stepdad with the massive cock. 

“Yeah,” says Seth, “we can do that.” He takes Simon’s hand and the light flashes, and then Simon nods and gets up, not looking any different at all to the way he had before.

Alisha turns to check with Curtis, to see if he wants to go next, but he shakes his head. So she walks over to the table and sits down, crossing one ankle primly over the other.

“What’ll it be, then?” asks Seth. 

Alisha takes a deep breath. There’s something specific she wants. But it’s hard to talk about it with words. 

“Is there a way,” she asks, “for me to be able to know more about … about how other people are feeling? Not to read minds or anything,” she adds hastily. “More, just like … putting myself in someone else’s shoes.” 

Seth looks thoughtful, sucks his teeth. “Yeah,” he says after a while, “I think we’ve got something in back you might like.” 

*

“Why did you pick your new power?” Simon asks her that night, under the sheets.

Alisha shrugs. “Dunno,” she says. “I just …” Her voice trails off, and for a second she just watches him watching her, his eyes solemn and intent and affectionate on her face. “I’m not always good at it,” she says at last. “Thinking about how other people feel. I’d like to be better at it.”

“You’ve always been good at that with me,” he says.

“You’re such a fucking liar,” she says, without heat, and he grins.

“Well, you try more now,” he says. “It’s nice.” He pauses reflectively. “I’ve never been good at telling how other people feel,” he says. “It’s one of the things that would have made school easier, I think.”

“Yeah, but at least you care,” Alisha says. “Like, if you make someone else feel like shit, it bothers you. You don’t do it just for fun, to see what happens.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I do it accidentally, because I don’t understand. Want to swap?”

“Fuck no,” Alisha says. “What do you think I got this power for?”


	8. Chapter 8

After everything that happens with the Jesus guy, it’s like she can’t stop touching Simon. Not around the bar, because she doesn’t need her shiny new power to know Curtis wouldn’t take kindly to such things right now. But every chance she gets she’s dragging him back to the flat, pushing him into the toilets at a club, into an alley outside a restaurant, anywhere she can shag him senseless for a while. 

She can finally touch him again. And they’re both alive. She’s not sure which one makes her want him more.

Not that he’s complaining. He’s getting obsessive about practicing on her the same way he’s obsessive about practicing parkour. Wants to get his hands on her again and again until he knows exactly where and how to touch her to make her whimper. She has to push him around to make him give her a turn now and then.

“Does it ever bother you,” she asks him one morning when she doesn’t have to be anywhere, pushing him to the bed and straddling his hips, “that you know what it’s like to get sucked off by a shapeshifter who looks like me, but not actually by me?”

His eyes go round, a little hopeful and a little afraid. “I — no?” he says. 

“Hmm,” Alisha says. “It bothers me,” and she bends down and takes him smoothly down her throat. 

He shouts and slams his head back into the mattress, and Alisha feels a savage and unreasonable pride as she starts working her head up and down. 

Not like she’s ever considered Lucy _competition_. Even Simon thought Lucy was too embarrassing to talk to in public, and he has a high bar for embarrassing. But Alisha feels furious sometimes at every girl who’s ever touched him. She wants to spoil him for them. Show him that no one else will ever be as good for him as she is. 

Ridiculous. She hasn’t got anything to prove. She is much, much, much prettier than Lucy, _and_ (she runs her tongue around his head on an upstroke, and Simon chokes) probably much better at blowjobs as well. So even if Lucy did make herself look like Alisha to get Simon to look at her, it doesn’t matter, because Alisha is still better. 

Jessica was prettier than Lucy but Alisha is prettier than Jessica, too, and Jessica was a virgin so Alisha must be better in bed than she was. And Alisha is prettier than Sally, too. 

Simon’s hands drift down to her head, and he pets her hair back from her face. “God,” he says. “God.”

The Sally thing was fucked up, though. Alisha doesn’t really know how far it went but considering Simon’s whole vibe at the time it can’t have been that far. Anyway, Sally was a probation worker, and there’s no way probation workers are good at sex. It’s just against the laws of nature.

So he’s hers. All hers. And she has nothing to worry about.

Still. Still. 

She sucks him down all the way to the root, hollowing her cheeks, and swallows, and he makes an agonized sound.

She wants to spoil him. She wants to ruin him. She wants to own him. 

He comes gasping her name with his hands fisted in her hair, and she holds him in her mouth until he comes down. Slides up his body afterwards and kisses him. She wants to kiss him everywhere.

He moans into her mouth and cradles her face, and then pushes her away just far enough that he can trace the lines of her cheekbones and her jaw. 

“Are you making sure it’s still me?” she asks him.

He won’t quite look at her, but his hands are urgent on her face. “Yeah,” he says. “Sorry. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t have thought it was you last time.”

“Because she wasn’t very good at sucking cock?” Alisha hazards.

“Because you wouldn’t have done that to Curtis,” he says. 

“Oh,” Alisha says, and then flops onto her back next to him. She bets Lucy wasn’t very good at sucking cock at all, though. “I sort of did do that to Curtis,” she confesses. “Never tell him, though, okay?”

“What?” Simon sounds absolutely shocked. “With who?”

“With you,” she says. “The other you. I didn’t really mean to, though; you took me by surprise. And I’m pretty sure Curtis had something going with Nikki by then, anyway, though I suppose that doesn’t make it better.”

Simon doesn’t say anything at all, and when she turns to look at him, he’s staring up at the ceiling. Looking very unhappy for someone who just got sucked off by the prettiest girl he’s ever likely to have. Her sense of satisfaction dims.

“It’s you, though,” she says. “You get that, yeah? The only reason I ever cheated on Curtis is because it was you. Because of what we have. That’s special. I would never, ever have done that with anybody else.”

Would she have? Maybe. She’s cheated on every other boyfriend she’s ever had. But Curtis was basically her best mate by the time they split up. Still is. And Alisha doesn’t fuck around on her friends.

“I just wonder,” Simon croaks, “if you would end up doing the same thing to me. If he were to come back.”

“What?” Alisha props herself up on one elbow, staring. “Did you just ask me if I plan on cheating on you, with you?”

He covers his face with his hands. “I know,” he says. “I know you think it doesn’t make sense, I just can’t — he’s so much better than me, at everything. Not just sex, all of it. I just keep thinking, it’s so unfair to you that wanted him and you got stuck with me. And I know you don’t want me to think that you’re stuck, but if it came down to him or me, it’s not like it would be a hard choice, would it?”

“It’s not a choice at all, because you’re both the same person,” she says. She’s so tired of this fight. “He’s you. You’re him. I picked you.” _I love you_ , she thinks about saying, but that wouldn’t be fair to say to him in the middle of a fight. “I chose you, so what does it matter when I did it?”

He pulls his hands down from his face, sitting up suddenly. “It’s like with Lucy,” he says. “It bothers you. That she — did that that to me, and I thought she was you. It’s like that.”

“All right, but Lucy actually was a mental patient dressed up in my skin, and the other you was just you,” Alisha points out. 

“So if he came back all of a sudden, you wouldn’t see a difference? You’d be perfectly happy with either one of us?”

“Well, that’s not a choice I’ll ever have to make, Simon,” she says, voice venomous, “because he’s dead.”

“Yes,” he says, “and I’m what you got left with.”

“You’re a really annoying little twat sometimes, you know that?” she says, and marches straight to the toilet to brush her teeth.

*  
He’s gone by the time she gets out, and then she doesn’t see him all day. He doesn’t text her to tell her where he is, either. She spends her shift at the bar glaring daggers at everyone, and her tips are absolute shit. Curtis says, “Trouble with the little missus?” and she isn’t quite sure what face she makes in response, but he throws up his hands and backs away from her at once, like he thinks she’ll bite him. 

She gets home at midnight, and Simon still isn’t there. She hasn’t got any messages from him, either. She gets into bed and stares up at the ceiling and tries to pretend like she can sleep, but she can’t. She can’t at all.

She could use her new power and see where he is. Would that be allowed? Or would that be wrong, the way using her old power on him was wrong? She can’t always tell where the boundary is. Better not, she decides, even though she really doesn’t feel like she owes him any extra rope at this point. 

A little after two she hears him let himself in through the lift. He comes in through the chain curtain around their bed and toes off his shoes, and then he climbs into the bed behind her, still dressed in his jeans and hoodie, and wraps his arms around her. 

“Where were you?” she asks.

“The roofs,” he says, “practicing.” 

“It’s dark out,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, “it wasn’t very clever.”

She reaches down to check his hands, and there’s a long raw scrape down his left palm, and bruises on his right knuckles. Probably she’ll find new bruises on the rest of him if she goes looking. She lifts up his left hand and kisses the scrape.

“You should have told me where you were,” she says, and he nods against her neck.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “For all of it. I don’t know why I said all that before.”

“I’m not going to keep having this fight with you,” she says. “I’m sorry that I dated a different version of you before I got to know you-you, but it’s what happened. I can’t change that.” 

“I know you can’t,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said any of that. It wasn’t fair to you.”

She rolls over so she can face him. “I know what you meant, though.”

He won’t look her in the eye. “I shouldn’t have said it,” he says.

“When you said it was like I am about Lucy,” she clarifies. “I know what you mean. I don’t like thinking about you with anyone else. I don’t like it that you’ve been with anyone else.”

He’s startled into eye contact at that. “There’s only been one other person, though.”

“I know,” Alisha says. “I hate her. And I’m sorry, I know she was a very nice girl and you really liked her and she was in a fucked-up situation with her dad, and I hope she has a very nice life and all that, but I absolutely fucking hate that you’ve touched anyone else who’s not me in your whole life. It makes me furious.” She plays with the zipper on his hoodie. “I guess you’re supposed to evolve past that,” she says. “In grown-up relationships. Chloe’s book says. But I haven’t, yet. Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” he breathes. “That’s okay.”


	9. Chapter 9

After they’ve paid for their new powers, and then spent another couple weeks doling out the money to sort out any immediate outstanding debts, there’s enough money left over from the Jesus guy for all of them to do one big thing. Kelly decides to use hers for rocket parts to practice her new power on, and Curtis isn’t in the mood to think of anything good to do with his, but Alisha wants to do something properly wild with hers.

“We never just go out and have fun,” she tells Simon. “We’re young offenders, for fuck’s sake, let’s live like it. Let’s hire a limo and get drunk and drive it into the sea. Let’s go to a club and buy everyone there a wrap of coke. Let’s buy our way into a high-stakes poker game, right, and then steal the pot, but they’ll never catch us because we’ll drive all the money into the sea with the limo.”

“Let’s go to Las Vegas,” he says.

“Seriously?” she asks.

He nods, and she shrieks and throws her arms around him. 

*

“That’s fucking brilliant,” says Nathan, when they tell the others. “Las Vegas is the perfect place for a magician. I’ll be raking in cash by the shitload.”

“You’re not invited,” says Alisha. “This is a private trip.”

“Barry, mate, you’re a fucking genius. I’m telling Marnie right away so she can get Nathan Jr. ready. Can you fly with a baby?”

“Er … no,” says Simon, as Alisha glares at him. “No, I don’t think you can.”

*

“Barry!” Nathan screams across the airport as they’re queuing to board their flight. “Guess what! You _can_ fly with a baby!”

*

“It’s fine,” Alisha says on the plane, taking deep, soothing breaths. “There’s millions of people in Las Vegas. He’s got no way of knowing where we’re staying. We’ll never see him once we’ve landed.”

Simon becomes studiously involved in the in-flight safety packet. Alisha narrows her eyes at him.

“Simon?”

“He helped me pick out the hotel,” Simon admits.

*

Alisha does not particularly care for Marnie, who is far too close to Nathan in a skirt for her tastes, but at least Marnie slows Nathan down long enough that it’s easier to escape him. The minute Marnie’s got Nathan distracted by Nathan Jr. as they all check in, Alisha grabs Simon and drags him out of the hotel and down the Strip. “Venetian first,” she says. “That’s where the beautiful people go.”

Simon wants to play blackjack because he’s got a theory that it’s all statistics and if he can do the maths fast enough he’ll make a fortune, but he loses a hundred dollars in ten minutes and comes away looking dizzied. So they try the roulette tables next, because Alisha thinks they look glamorous. She wins twenty dollars on a lucky roll and jumps up and down screaming, and the bloke next to her tries to peer down her dress and asks her to blow on the dice for good luck.

“Stake me my next roll and I might,” she says, batting her eyes. He puts a hundred dollar chip down on the table for her, and she pockets it and grabs Simon’s hand and walks away. 

“D’you want to scam the poker tables?” she asks him.

*

With a little judicious use of her power to steal peeks at her opponents’ hands, Alisha walks away from her poker game a thousand dollars richer than she was before. She wants to keep going, but Simon has dire warnings of how the casinos will think she’s a cheat and she’ll wind up in an American prison, “and I know you’re very tough but from what I’ve seen in films I don’t think you’d enjoy the amenities.”

“Did you research this before we got here?” Alisha demands. “Or do you just know about casino rules and regulations? Is it one of your areas of interest?”

“Nathan wants to use his power to scam the casinos, too,” he says. “I was trying to talk him out of it.”

“Nathan couldn’t do it with the style I did,” she mutters. Imagine having the same plan Nathan did. Disgusting.

She has the casino cash out her winnings in small bills, even though she can’t fit them all in her purse and Simon has to tuck some into his pockets as they walk back to their hotel. “Let’s do it like in that piece of shit film with Demi Moore,” she says, and they spread the cash out across the hotel bed, where it crinkles underneath them.

The sex is getting better all the time now. All that obsessive study is all paying off, he knows how to touch her and where, and the whole time he watches her with that intense focus she remembers from her future boy. 

He’s so much happier than her future boy was, though. He watches her like she’s someone he likes to watch, not like he’s trying to forget the worst thing he’s ever seen and she’s the only thing that can save him. The cash rucks up uncomfortably against her arse and she has to push it all away from her in disgust, and he starts laughing while he’s inside her, and she never thought it would ever be this easy with them.

Afterwards they lay in bed and watch the neon lights of the Strip start to turn on below, and she thinks about how each of those lights is a party, and she can dance her way through every last one of them if she wants to. 

“Why did you always want to go to Las Vegas?” he asks her, curling her hair around his fingers.

“Because there’s nowhere else in the world where everyone is as gorgeous and fun as I am,” she says brashly.

“But no one else is like you,” he says. “Except for Nathan, who also thinks he can use his power to beat the casinos.”

“If you want to spend the rest of your trip with Marnie and Nathan instead of ever having sex with me again, that’s fine with me,” Alisha says.

*

Later that night they get ready to go out to hit the parties, at which Alisha will party and Simon will sit in a corner and be polite. Alisha has dressed and put up her hair and is in the middle of putting in her best gold hoop earrings when Simon says, “Oh. I didn’t expect it to be the first night.”

She looks over, and he’s looking in bemusement at the shirt he’s just pulled out of his suitcase, and then back at her. She looks at the shirt, too, but it’s just an ordinary shirt: a blue polo, creased where he’s folded it, a little bit ugly but not as bad as that orange hoodie he used to lug about when he was the other him.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“I just picked up the first shirt I saw in the pile, but — and your jewelry,” he says. When she still doesn’t say anything he explains, “This is what we’re wearing in the picture.”

Oh. The Vegas picture. That hadn’t occurred to her. 

She used to think about it all the time. Kept it with her so she would always have it close. Before she and this Simon started dating, it felt like a promise: she didn’t need to feel so lonely or so abandoned by her future’s boy death, because she would have that picture someday. She’d be that close to him again. 

But lately, it’s started to feel like a threat. Of the future that he’s so convinced is coming. The future she keeps trying to pull him away from.

So she hasn’t looked at it in a while. She supposes he must have, though.

Alisha thinks about the Vegas picture but she can’t see in her head what they’re wearing in it. Just how close they’re standing. How easily they’re touching. How happy their faces look.

“I knew we must take it this trip but I didn’t expect it to be so early,” Simon says. “I wonder where the sign is. I suppose we could ask the concierge.”

Of course the picture is why he wanted to go. He doesn’t even like parties, why else would he be here? 

That choking, smothering unease she always feels when he talks about the idea that the timeline is a loop creeps into her throat. She tamps it down and smiles. “What if we don’t take it?” she says.

He doesn’t get it. “What?”

“I mean let’s not take it!” Her voice is idiotically cheerful. She’s presenting the idea to him like he’s a child and she’s a mum with vegetables: _See how nummy!_ “Let’s not go out looking for the sign. To show we don’t have to. To show we’re in charge.”

“But we do have to,” he says, brow furrowed. “That’s how a time loop works. It doesn’t matter what our intentions are, because one way or another we know we take this photo.” 

“Well then, that’s easy, isn’t it?” she says. “We don’t need to go out looking for the sign, because whatever happens, we know we’ll end up next to it with a camera clicking. So why bother going to look for it? In fact, why bother going on this trip and working on our relationship, if we know we’ll be together no matter what? Why bother doing anything at all, if we know that no matter what we do you end up dead?” Her voice turns hard as nails halfway through.

He flinches. Turns away from her, pulls on his shirt. “We all end up dead,” he says, voice muffled through the fabric. “But there can be something good in between.” 

He sounds like he’s rehearsed the thought. He sounds like he’s repeated it to himself a lot. He’s never said it to her before, though.

“We don’t all die in our _twenties_ , Simon,” she says viciously, and then he turns around to face her and looks completely wretched, and she can’t retain the anger. It drains out of her, as though her body’s turned into a sieve and she can’t hold onto anything anymore.

So instead she goes over and buries her face against his chest and lets him hug her. “I’m sorry,” she mutters. “We can look for the fucking sign if you want.”

“No,” he says. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter if we look for it or not. Let’s just go.”

So they go out, and Alisha dances and flirts and accepts free drinks and laughs, and Simon guards her purse and watches her and startles every time someone else speaks to him, and Alisha gets very, very drunk.

Sometime after midnight they’re walking out of a nightclub to check out the casino up the way with half of a bachelorette party, and the girl Alisha is arm-in-arm with, whose name she has forgotten but with whom she has sworn eternal friendship, squeals with delight. “Ohmigod it’s the _sign_!” she says.

With a dull feeling of inevitability Alisha turns around, and there it is: _Welcome to Fantastic Las Vegas, Nevada_ , in red and white neon. 

“You have to take my picture,” the girl says, and pushes a camera into Alisha’s hands as she runs over to pose in front of the sign like the girls on _Top Model_ : chin up, hip jutting out.

Alisha looks numbly at the camera, but she can’t work out how to take the photo.

“I’ll do it,” says Simon, much more sober, taking the camera out of her hands and finding the shutter.

“ _Thank you_ ,” the girl gushes after he’s taken a few. “Come on, I’ll take one of you guys!”

Simon turns to Alisha like he’s asking for permission, and a kind of manic sense of purpose descends on her. “Go on, then,” she tells him, “let’s do this properly,” and pulls him in front of the sign and draws his arms around her. 

“Hey,” she says, “I love you.”

He looks down at her in surprise, and then he beams at her. “I love you too,” he says.

He’s still smiling like that when the girl calls, “Look up here!” and the shutter clicks: radiantly, like he’s been surprised by his own happiness. But Alisha is smiling cooly at the camera’s lens like it’s a challenge. She’s thinking, _Just you try and die on me. Just you fucking try_.


	10. Chapter 10

When they get back from Las Vegas, Alisha doesn’t have her job at the bar anymore.

“You have to ask for time off,” Curtis explains, “you can’t just take off whenever you feel like it,” which sounds like complete bullshit, but whatever, it’s fine. Not like she was planning on making bartending her career, anyway.

“I’m going to look for something really good this time,” she tells Simon. “Like working in a shop. But a nice shop, not a shit one. Or I could plan parties or something.”

He shrugs. “Our rent’s paid through the year. We still have money left. There’s no rush.”

Simon hasn’t got a job. He did a work placement in a video lab for a bit, but after it ended he didn’t look for another. Training takes up too much of his time, he says. It’s like he thinks being a superhero is an actual job, but it’s not, she tells him, just an incredibly weird hobby, and he makes that face he gets when he’s trying not to laugh at her and goes out to practice some more.

So Alisha decides to take a month and really think about what she wants for her future. Take her time with it, she tells her dad, and he tells her he’s proud of her, and that it’s important she think these things through.

She wants a big life, she thinks, scrolling through pages of job listings on her laptop, a beautiful life and a fun life. It doesn’t need to be posh or dramatic. But she knows for certain she wants more than staring at the concrete walls of the estate day after day after day, picking up other peoples’ rubbish.

*

The month off sounded luxurious in her head but in real life it’s boring as fuck. She finds herself sitting in their windowless little flat all day, pretending to research jobs but actually staring at her phone. So she makes herself go out, visit Kelly at her job for the council to talk about rockets, and why people won’t hire Kelly to engineer them even though she’d be dead good at it, and how Kelly should switch her lipstick to a brighter red now she’s dyed her hair dark. Visit Curtis at the bar to talk about what bullshit that job is, and how glad Alisha is that she’s not doing it anymore, and how Curtis is going to move on from it soon, too.

A couple of times she goes out to brunch with Chloe. But it’s not as fun to hang out with Chloe as it used to be. They don’t seem to have so much to talk about anymore. 

She tries to visit Simon on his parkour training sessions. But it freaks her out too much, seeing him throw himself from roof to roof.

The first time she saw her future boy somersault off a terrace, Alisha thought, _That’s not bad at all_. It seemed so sexy and mysterious then. But seeing Simon do it now just makes her think about how little the idea of dying seems to bother him.

“Don’t you do anything else with yourself all day?” she asks him once. “Kelly and Curtis say you hardly ever come round to see them.”

“I do sometimes,” he says vaguely. “They’re busy a lot.”

“Well, what about other people?” she says. “Don’t you go and visit your other friends or see your family or anything?”

“I don’t have other friends,” he says matter-of-factly, which she supposes she knew. “And what would I talk to my family about? The last vision I had?”

“Or you could ask your sister how she likes her school friends,” Alisha suggests, but he just shakes his head and starts working on his backflip. 

Alisha doesn’t miss Nathan, not at all. But it does strike her that if Nathan had come back from Las Vegas with them there would have been at least one other person who might occasionally bother to drag Simon down from the rooftops. 

*

Every single job Alisha is qualified for sounds absolutely fucking boring. But she’s lived through community service and bartending, so at least she knows how to do mindless shit. 

“You could be a dog walker,” Kelly suggests. “Some of the dogs are dead cute, yeah, and all you’ve got to do is walk around all day.”

“You could work at a bank,” Curtis says. “I’ve been looking for when I move on from the bar. You don’t need a degree and the cash is good.”

“You could model,” Simon says, which is actually pretty flattering.

“But I’ve seen enough films where beautiful models get murdered by stalkers,” she says.

“I’d protect you,” he says. “I’d chase away all your stalkers.” 

“But that’ll be a full time job, though,” Alisha says. “When will you have time to do anything else?”

“I’d just follow you around all day,” he says. “There are loads worse things to do.”

He keeps saying shit like that. Where he’s joking, but sort of not really, about how he doesn’t have a life outside of her. And it’s not her fault, either, because she’s not clingy or possessive or — well, she _is_ possessive, okay, fine, but she doesn’t _make_ him spend all his time with her. He chose it. He’s built this whole life for himself and it’s all about her. 

It feels like too much, sometimes. She loves him, and she loves being with him, but it’s too much to be the only thing in one person’s life. Too much pressure, too much worry. What if something happens to her? What will he do then?

“Simon’s fine,” Kelly says. “You know he always said we should be doing shit with our powers to help people. So he’s focused on that right now. He always used to be thinking about it, when he wasn’t blabbing on and on in his head about you. Honestly, mate, he got dead boring after you two started shagging.”

But Kelly doesn’t know that Simon is planning to, like actively training for his plan to, go back in time to die for Alisha. And Alisha was always careful what she let her mind linger on around Kelly when Kelly could still read minds, because that’s not something Kelly needs to know. She and Simon agreed on that, back when she first told him everything; that their friends didn’t ever need to know about the loop. 

He needs something more. More anchors, more things to tie him to the world. So it’s not just her, and then little peripheral friendships with Kelly and Curtis. He needs to have more, to keep him from ever wanting to go back. 

Would a job do that? Jobs are mostly shit, in Alisha’s experience, but it would be an anchor, wouldn’t it? Some sort of purpose.

“What if you got a job, too?” she asks him.

He frowns. “I’m busy. It’s a really delicate time with training, and everything I’ve read says it’s bad to back off when you’re at this stage.” 

Meanwhile she still hasn’t found anything she wants to do herself. Every job she sees is just one piece of boring bullshit after another. But she has to do _something_ , doesn’t she, or she’ll drive herself mental, stewing around in their basement flat with no windows. And why couldn’t he have built himself a superhero lair that got natural sunlight, while he was at it? 

The month she gave herself is almost up, and she still hasn’t found anything she wants to do, and that’s when she sees Rudy Wade for the first time since school. 

*  
Seeing Rudy comes with a very specific set of very unpleasant memories, and she doesn’t like to think too hard about that part of her life anymore. So she tries to dodge him, which she doesn’t think should be that difficult.

But he keeps showing up, somehow: first he’s in her flat, in her literal flat, and then somehow he’s at the bar every time she is. She doesn’t understand how she successfully avoided him for so long only to start tripping all over him every time she turns around all of a sudden. 

And then he has to go and start blabbing on to Simon and Kelly and Curtis all about how they know each other. That’s one of the things she remembers about Rudy: he never could stop fucking talking.

Alisha fucked Rudy Wade at a party during college, because she felt like it and he said yes. She doesn’t particularly feel that anyone is entitled to hear any of the rest of that story. But since Rudy is running around telling both her best friends and her boyfriend and the girl he’s currently shagging all about it, fine, here it is.

Alisha fucked Rudy Wade at a party during college because she overheard her ex-boyfriend going on and on to his mates about how she cheated on him, and he wound up with, “But what did I expect, dating the fucking Cock Monster,” and that made her feel like shit. So she wanted to fuck someone who looked at her like he was in love with her, which would make her feel better. And Rudy reliably looked at her like he was in love with her.

It was not good sex. He lasted barely two minutes and tried to stick his tongue down her ear canal and kept up a nervous stream of chatter _the entire time he was inside her_ , and at the end he gazed worshipfully at her and said, “Thank you for being my first,” which was just a very cringe moment. But it was two minutes where she didn’t have to think about a guy she’d spent a whole month with telling all his fucking mates she was a Cock Monster.

They all said that about her. Cock Monster. Because she liked sex, she guesses, and because also she was choosy about who she had it with, which they resented. And because she got bored with most blokes quickly. Which was not and is not Alisha’s fault: most blokes are boring.

What was her fault, she thinks now, was that she always picked up a new bloke before she let the last one go. It was just that she hated the feeling of being alone. 

Still hates it. Life is always better with someone showering attention on her. And with most blokes the high of the attention wears off after a couple of weeks. So in school she was always after the next one as soon as the old high faded.

It took Curtis for her to see how shallow most of that attention used to be. Most of the boys she dated before were only paying attention to the sex, but Curtis liked Alisha specifically, liked her enough to stay with her when he couldn’t touch her. And thank fuck for that, because her old power made her feel more alone than she ever felt before when she was between boyfriends.

If every time someone brushes against you they start yammering on about how you’re nothing but a convenient set of holes — well. Like she told Simon that one time: it doesn’t make you feel very good about yourself. But Curtis liked her as a person enough to be her friend first and her boyfriend second, and that meant something. 

And then her future boy showed up, and that was something else again.

He told her that he came back for her. That she meant enough for him to _risk his life traveling the dimensions of time for her_. When he was with her, she wasn’t the Cock Monster or the untouchable girl or the girl everyone wanted to fuck and no one wanted to talk to. She was the girl who was so important that he fucked cause and effect irrevocably to hell, just so he could be with her. 

And then he died for her. 

It does make a girl feel special.

“I wanted to die because of you,” says Rudy. The Other Rudy. Why do all the boys she fucks always come with doubles?

She tells him that it’s not her fault he tried to kill himself, which she only part of the way believes, and she goes home.

*

In the flat she changes into her night things, which are cozy pajamas instead of slinky ones now because they’re at that comfort level, which is nice. And then she stews. 

Rudy fucking Wade. 

By the time Simon gets home, she has reached a few conclusions. 

First, it wasn’t wrong for her to fuck Rudy when she did. They both said yes, and they were both mostly sober, and she didn’t use her power on him because she didn’t even have a power back then, and it was bad sex but otherwise it was fine.

Second, it was wrong for her to act like she’d never met him the next time she saw him. That was a shitty thing to do. And it was wrong for her to let him think the sex meant he had a chance with her, instead of just being her wanting to feel pretty for a night, when she knew the way he felt about her. That was her using him, and she doesn’t want to be the kind of person who uses people anymore.

What she can’t work out is: surely that can’t mean she’s _responsible_ for him trying to kill himself? That’s on him, isn’t it?

That’s what the social worker at the college said. She went around and talked to all Rudy’s “known associates” about his “non-fatal self-harm,” and Alisha’s name was on Rudy’s fucking note, so the social worker made sure to spend special time on her. She said a lot of things about how no one was responsible for Rudy’s actions but Rudy, and how if Rudy built up a series of fantasies about how only Alisha was going to save him from the sadness of his life, it was not on Alisha to prioritize those fantasies. She had to look after herself first. 

That felt pretty much right to Alisha. The same way that when she first got her power, when men would touch her and then attack her, she felt sure that it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t done anything. How could it be on her?

But it kept fucking happening and happening. And after a while it started to feel like it had to be her. Because what else would explain it?

And now it looks like boys are just lining up to die for her. So it has to be something to do with her, doesn’t it. Because what else explains it?

The third thing Alisha has concluded is that being called The Cock Monster is humiliating to begin with, and being called The Cock Monster in front of your boyfriend who still reliably looks at you like he loves you is even worse.

Simon tells Alisha that none of it matters, because all that matters is them, right now. Which makes her feel a little bit better about her using Rudy and about the Cock Monster bit, but also makes her feel much worse about the “all the boys dying for her” bit. It’s just exactly what someone who’s planning on dying for her would say, isn’t it?

*

What actually makes Alisha feel better is saving Rudy’s life. Simon’s not the only one who gets to run about being a superhero.

*

When Rudy gets them all back into community service, she complains with the rest of them. But actually in a strange way she isn’t that bothered.

“Guess I’m not going to work at that bank anytime soon,” Curtis says.

“I could get through it when they were paying me for this shit,” Kelly says, “but now they’re not even doing that anymore?”

“I have so much work to do,” Simon says, and then sort of gazes at his new speedsuit. He had it made when they got back from Las Vegas, and it fits him like a glove, and every time Alisha sees it she feels absolutely fucking terrified.

“Yeah,” says Alisha, “and I haven’t even had time to sort out what I want to do next.”

But she has had time. She’s had plenty of time. She just still hasn’t found the thing yet. She’s starting to get a feeling deep in her bones that she’s not going to find it.

“Oh well,” says Simon, “at least we’ll be together all day,” and wraps his arms around her. 

She beams at him and kisses him. “And Curtis and Kelly, yeah?” she says. “The gang’s all back together again.” Minus Nathan, but honestly, that’s an upgrade.

She thinks there’s a chance this could actually work out really well for her. Community service is absolute shit, but it’s an anchor. It’ll give them something to hold onto. Something for her to make Simon hold onto, while she tries to find whatever else she’ll need to keep him from going back.

As long as no more of that weird shit that went down last time goes down this time, she won’t have anything to worry about.


	11. Chapter 11

Seeing Simon palling around with the weird kid does things to her head.

It’s like it reminds her of how — well, how weird he used to be. How weird he still sort of is. 

Which she honestly doesn’t mind. Alisha has made her peace with the way he doesn’t always know what to say or how long to stare. She’s far gone enough on him that most of the time now it strikes her as kind of sweet. She loves him, and the weirdness is part of him, and that’s fine with her.

But seeing him with the new weird kid — Peter — it’s like it brings it home to her how he must seem to other people, sometimes. And she’s trying not to mind what other people think too much anymore, but her skin still prickles with discomfort just contemplating it. 

It’s incredibly shallow of her, probably. So she tries not to mind it. When Simon tells her he’s hanging out with Peter, brushing self-consciously at his hair the way he doesn’t really do that often anymore, she smiles and tells him to have fun.

But then she comes home and she finds Simon’s suit laid out on their bed. Peter gawking at it with sweaty palms, Simon gesturing expansively. Like little boys showing each other their action toys. 

She has to lean on Simon to send Peter home, but as soon as Peter’s gone she rips into him.

“How could you do that?” she demands. “How could you tell him something so private, so personal — we haven’t even told our _actual friends_ about that, Simon —”

“Peter is my friend,” Simon says, which he’s been repeating like a mantra this whole day.

“Peter is a stranger!” Alisha says. She can’t believe she has to keep explaining this to him. She knows he hasn’t had many friends before so he might be a little shaky on the question of how quickly friendships should be formed, but she also knows he’s loyal to their group. It was one of the first actually good things she ever noticed about him. It’s so unlike him, to bring in an interloper like this. “He’s a stranger, and you just went and told him —”

“I told you, he already knew about the suit, he recognized me and there was nothing I could do —”

“You could have not told him about the future!” she cries. “You just went and _told_ him, and I’ve _never_ told anybody but you, and _you weren’t even there_. You don’t understand what it was like. It was the worst thing, the worst thing that ever happened to me, and you just went and you gave it all to a stranger.”

Simon stares at her blankly. He doesn’t seem to quite register what she’s said. Is maybe even a little offended. “It’s how we fell in love,” he says.

“It’s _not_ ,” Alisha says vehemently. “It was the worst day of my life, it broke my heart, there was nothing good that came from that day, absolutely nothing.” 

Simon draws himself up. There’s a giddy brightness to his eyes she’s never seen before. “Dying for you is my destiny,” he says.

Alisha hears a dull roaring in her ears. Her mind swims with fury. “Fuck you,” she tells him, and storms out to get good and wasted with Chloe, or Ellie, or Chloe’s ugly methhead brother if she has to. Fucking anyone who would never unironically use the word _destiny_.

*  
 _Fights pass_ , she thinks, and this one does.

When she gets home after midnight, Simon is sitting up waiting for her. “Did you have a good time?” he asks.

She shrugs, slipping out of her shoes, weaving a little on her feet. The cocktails had been very strong. “Was all right,” she says.

He wraps an arm around her, steadying her, and kisses her forehead. “I’m sorry,” he says. “About what happened earlier. I don’t know what came over me. It was like I couldn’t think clearly. I can’t even really remember what I said.”

She relaxes against him and breathes in deep. “S’okay,” she mumbles into his chest. “Let’s just sleep, yeah? We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

But in the morning Simon splits up with her.

It’s almost funny, what a shock it is. She truly never saw it coming.

No one has ever dumped Alisha before. No one ever would, because she is the most beautiful and desirable girl around, and she makes sure everyone knows it, and she makes sure to always be the one to move on first. 

To be dumped for the first time — and by _Simon_ of all people — 

It’s just that it has never once occurred to her that he ever might not want to be with her. 

And not just because she’s out of his league, even though she knows he knows she is. But the way he looks at her, the way he touches her. Like everything about her matters to him more than anything in the world. How could she not trust him? 

Has he been getting bored with her? She would know, surely?

Is it because he finally realized how shallow she is?

And what the fuck was that complete crap he was talking? _Sacrificing their love for the greater good_? That’s some comic book bullshit, is what that is. It’s got weird kid written all over it. 

*

It’s almost a relief, when she realizes Peter has a power, and he used it on Simon to make him split up with her. 

Sure, it’s disconcerting to realize that there’s yet another person with low social skills and a superpower obsessed with her boyfriend — and wow, Simon really does attract the freaks, doesn’t he, Alisha would be worried about herself if she didn’t know better — but at least a power is something she can fix. Or an excuse to hit the weird kid, if nothing else. Better yet, make Kelly do it. 

So she rounds up the whole gang to go face down Peter, and she doesn’t expect it will be too much trouble. He’s a weed. Alisha could probably give him a black eye herself; it would just be more fun to watch Kelly do it.

But then, out of nowhere, there’s Simon in his suit and his mask and his hood, jumping in front of Peter exactly the way he jumped between her and the bullet. Will jump between her and the bullet. 

Won’t jump. Because she’s not going to let him do that.

It’s Peter’s power. Alisha is dead fucking certain of that. There’s no way Simon has any idea what he’s doing. He would never, if he were in his right mind. Would never, ever touch any one of them like this.

It still hurts when, moving with a queer robotic stiffness, he shoves her away from him. Does it with enough force that when she lands on the ground the impact stuns her.

The other day, when she wrapped up his hand, she had been so angry with him, and he had been so earnest when he looked at her and said, “I’ll always save you.” Which she had thought even then was a wankload of rubbish, so she doesn’t know why she should be thinking about it now.

*

She stays with Kelly that night, and they talk about whether Peter might just be Lucy with a new power and shapeshifted into a weedy-looking weird boy, because truly what are the odds that this many socially maladjusted people would all be so obsessed with Simon? 

“Even though he _is_ really fanciable, though,” says Alisha, and Kelly sort of nods politely, like she doesn’t see it and doesn’t care to but is happy Alisha thinks so anyway.

“I’ll ask Seth if he sold her anything,” Kelly says, but Alisha thinks Kelly just wants an excuse to talk to Seth. At least someone’s love life is exciting in a good way.

They don’t talk about the guy with the mask at all, because Alisha has established to the whole group that she is not interested in talking about the guy with the mask and has no theories as to who he might be or what he might want. And they don’t talk about whatever Simon and Peter are getting up to right now, because Alisha is pretty sure it involves comic books and Kelly doesn’t need to hear a whole tirade about what complete fucking rubbish every comic book ever written is, and that tirade absolutely will come out of Alisha’s mouth given the slightest chance and she won’t be able to stop it.

“Maybe Peter’s power wears off after a day,” she says hopefully. “Like we’ll get to community service tomorrow and Simon’ll be there and everything will be fine.”

“Yeah, mate,” says Kelly, “maybe.” 

But when they get to the community service the next morning Simon isn’t there. And when Alisha uses her power to check in on him, just to make sure he isn’t lying dead in a ditch or locked up in some sort of superhero fetish dungeon Peter’s cobbled together, she finds that they are indeed reading comic books. 

In a frankly astonishing effort of will she swallows her comic book tirade. Instead she tells the others to come with her so she can get into Peter’s creepy fucking comic book Simon shrine.

*

When she gets back to the flat after ripping up Peter’s drawings, Simon is an utter wreck. He is shaking; he looks appalled with himself; he looks, for the first time in a long time, as ruined as that freak who stuck his dead probation worker girlfriend in the freezer. 

He tells her he has no idea why he split up with her. He tells her he would never. 

“I want you back,” he says, voice cracking. “Let’s get back together. Can we do that? Don’t say no, please don’t say no.”

She tells him that it’s not his fault, that it was all Peter and his power, and he shakes his head. With delicate fingers he pushes the hair out of her face to look at the bruise there, just the way the other him did when she first met him. And just like when he did it that time, all the breath goes out of her. 

“I hurt you,” he says, and his voice and face, all of his body, all of it is tensed flat with horror. 

“It wasn’t you,” she tells him, and he shakes his head again.

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

Simon has this way sometimes of saying things that should be nonsense or embarrassing, and saying them so sincerely they loop back around again to become meaningful: _You fall in love with me. I’m going to go kill Jesus. It’s like in_ Terminator. 

He’s doing it now. It’s so weird. She loves it. She loves him. 

He puts his arms around her and holds onto her so tightly, like if he’s not careful he’ll turn around and find that they’ve gone and split up again. Like he can’t believe he gets to hold her. She slips her arms around his waist and buries her face against his chest, and she thinks savagely to Peter, _You don’t get to stop this._

Out loud she tells Simon, “You’re not leaving me.”

“No,” he says, “not ever, no, I’m not,” and he presses desperate kisses to her face, her eyelids, her nose, her jaw, and then finally to her mouth.

Alisha brings her arms up and over his shoulders, moaning against him. She feels an unbearable urge to mark him, make him hers, so everyone can see he belongs to her. She bites down hard on his lower lip, and when he gasps she sweeps her tongue into his mouth. Kisses him until he is trembling against her, hands shaking against her hair, the small of her back.

“Alisha,” he whispers against her lips, “Alisha,” and she trails kisses away from his mouth, down his jaw, to that spot on his jugular. Drags her teeth across it, sucks the skin into her mouth, worries it raw. 

“Oh god,” he says, “oh god, yes.” 

She bites down, finally, and he shouts, hips jerking against hers, clutching her to him. He stumbles forward and she realizes that he’s going to try to walk all the way to the bed, but that’s fucking miles away, all the way across the flat, so she shakes her head, pushes him back and back until she’s got him pressed up against the concrete slab of their kitchen counter. 

“No one gets to take you away from me,” she tells him.

“Not ever,” he says, “I belong to you,” and she kisses him fiercely, pressing herself against him, trying to feel small and safe and protected.

And he knows, somehow, he knows, because then he picks her up and turns them around and puts her on top of the counter, and she spreads her legs and he stands between them and pulls her flush with the edge and so close to him, so close it’s like their bodies are melding into one single fluid line, and he is surrounding her: his arms around her shoulders so tight it’s hard to breathe; his hands spread warmly across her back; his chest firm against her breasts; his mouth crushing to hers as she holds his jaw in her hands and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him. 

When he pulls back it’s just far enough to pull off her jacket, and then her T-shirt and her bra, and then he is pressed against her again, hands flat on her back, eyes firm on her face.

“I’m yours,” he tells her, “for as long as you want me.”

She feels greedy, hedonistic. She wants everything. “Forever,” she says, and unbuttons his shirt. 

He catches his breath and his eyes turn dark. “Forever,” he says, kissing her, letting her push the shirt off his arms, and then his hands are shaking and urgent on the button of her jeans.

She helps him get them undone and peel them down with her knickers, kicking off her shoes and socks on the way. And then his trousers and boxers, which take a while, because her hands are shaking, too. But at last they’re out of the way, and she pushes him down to the floor and follows after him.

“Wait,” he says, and dives for his shirt. Folds it into a messy sort of rectangle and lays it out on the floor — as a pillow, she realizes, because he’ll shag her on their kitchen floor but he doesn’t want her to be uncomfortable when he does it. 

Her heart feels swollen. The things he does to her.

“Simon,” she says, desperately. Kisses him, clings to him, and he kisses her back and pushes her until she’s lying with her head on his shirt. Then he crawls up over her, and then he’s holding her face in his hands and kissing her very gently as he pushes inside of her. 

She wraps her legs around his waist, her hands in his hair. “This is real,” she says.

“Yes,” he says, rocking against her. “None of what happened before was real, but this is, this is — Alisha —”

There is heat building inside of her, spiralling, utterly out of her control. She rocks her hips up to meet him, moving feverishly. “It wasn’t real,” she repeats. “You would never do those things.”

“Never,” he says, “I would never.” Kisses her eyebrow, her cheek, her clavicle, then lifts himself up on his palms, bracing himself above her, moving harder and faster. “I thought I ruined it all,” he says, eyes moving rapidly over her face, her breasts. “I didn’t understand it, I just knew I’d done it but I couldn’t work out why because I never wanted any of that, I only wanted you — I only want you —”

She hears a high-pitched noise coming from the back of her throat. She feels frantic against him, and he is moving so slow and steady and strong for her, even though she can see it’s costing him; there’s a fine trembling in the back of his neck. The heat is building higher and higher now. 

“I love you,” he says, and drives into her. She hears herself cry out, and the heat consumes her as she moves onto him again and again and again.

When it passes she feels clean and empty inside, as though she’s been wrung out. He is still hard inside of her, still trembling, and she winds her arms around his neck. “It wasn’t you, Simon,” she whispers in his ear. “It wasn’t you, you didn’t do any of those things. I’m here, I want you, I love you, and you belong to me.”

He shudders and jerks against her, whispering her name.

Afterwards she feels light, light and free and clean, and far too lazy to get up, even though the floor starts to feel hard and clammy and uncomfortable very quickly and his shirt is honestly not helping. She lies with her head on his chest while he cards through her hair with his fingers, and she tries to will the floor to become comfortable.

“I can’t believe we did that on the floor,” Simon says, scandalized.

“For a boy whose first time was in a public locker room, you’re awfully shocked,” she complains. “You clean this floor way more often than that locker room was ever cleaned.” 

“But there’s a bed just there,” he points out.

“All right, I can see that as your sex teacher I need to step in here,” she says. “You’ve been spoiled by beds. We’re doing a lesson on public sex next.”

“Oh,” he says, sounding delighted. “Where?”

“Spontaneity is part of the lesson,” she says, because she can’t be arsed to think of a decent place just now. It will come to her. The community center is full of hidden corners they can sneak away to; she practically had a checklist of them by the time she and Curtis ended things. 

He laughs and kisses her shoulder. “I missed you,” he says, “so much.”

*

Watching Peter die is the worst déjà vu she’s ever had in her life.

The blood on that sticky, filthy floor, and the way it smells thickly of copper. The suit lying limp on the ground, and inside it a boy who’s far too young to die. 

She tells Simon he’s not going to go back and die for her. And it’s like he finally gets it, finally understands what it would mean if he did. Not for him; she can see that he still doesn’t particularly care whether he lives or dies. But for her.

She watched him die once before, and it broke something inside of her. She can’t do it again. She refuses. Once is too many times. She shouldn’t have to do it again. She doesn’t have to do it again, because time travel is bullshit and the rules are all basically made up, and she’s fine right now so what would he even be going back in time for?

After he comes back from burning Peter’s body and the suit, he won’t quite look at her. “The only thing is, if I don’t go back,” he says, carefully, “I’m afraid the loop will fall apart. And then you’ll never fall in love with me.”

“That’s absolute shit,” she tells him. “I always fall in love with you.”

He tells her that he won’t go back. That he’ll stay with her always. And she can tell he finally means it.


	12. Chapter 12

She’s not going to say something sappy, like she’s finally got everything she wants. For one thing she’s still working community service, which remains the biggest fucking waste of time she’s ever dealt with. And she still doesn’t know what she wants to do after community service, except that it should be something at least slightly less boring.

Plus weird shit keeps happening in community service, just like it did last time. Nazis and body-swaps and Curtis impregnating himself and fucking zombie cheerleaders, which are a real bitch to clean up afterwards. 

The mess a bashed-in skull leaves behind is not to be believed. Especially when the pompoms get stuck in there.

But things are good, otherwise. Things are really good.

For the first time in her life she’s got real, proper friends. Not just people to score drugs with and do a boozy brunch with afterwards, but friends who’ve been through genuine shit with her. Who have her back and know she has theirs too. 

She’s got a boyfriend she loves, and he loves her back, and she’s finally got him out of his death wish spiral. She doesn’t have to worry anymore about when the day comes that he announces he’s leaving her so he can go take a bullet for her, because he promised her he isn’t going to do that, and he’s kept every promise he ever made her.

And by this point, they’ve actually gotten pretty decent at dealing with the weird shit. They even manage to stop the zombie apocalypse, after a false start where they forget about the cat. She has to use her power to track it down in one of the air vents of the community center — even though putting herself in a zombie cat’s bloody little paws is not the kind of empathy she was looking to cultivate with this new power — and then Curtis has to hold it down while Simon clobbers it with a bat, and they both come out gagging and agreeing they have been forever changed. 

But doing all that means they actually, literally save the world.

Alisha’s not going to say they’re like superheroes, because she’s not about to commit herself to a life of vigilante crime-fighting and then cleaning up dead bodies afterwards. But she does feel like a bit of a badarse when she’s finished battering the last zombie cheerleader to death.

Simon’s in his fucking element. He starts keeping a notebook with a list of all the comic book storylines he suspects they might have to deal with someday, although personally Alisha thinks he’s aiming a bit too high with most of them.

“Why would there be death rays?” she asks him.

“Why was there a gorilla in a gorilla suit?” he says, which she has to admit is a pretty fair point.

“You know what would be wicked, man,” says Rudy, “is if there was an alien invasion.”

Simon nods very seriously and writes _alien invasion_ down in his notebook.

“There ain’t going to be no alien invasion,” says Curtis, in his _you fucking idiot_ voice.

“We don’t know that,” Simon says. “Maybe aliens are what caused the storm.”

“You mean it’s some bullshit lizard man’s fault we all got these powers?” Kelly says.

“I think we could handle aliens,” Alisha says. “You’re a fucking rocket scientist, right? You could make a rocket and then I could use my power to see where to aim it, and anything that doesn’t take care of we’d just batter to death.” 

“That’s so wrong,” Curtis says, and Rudy edges away from her a little while Kelly raises a skeptical eyebrow. Simon beams at her.

“You like planning this sort of thing,” he says to her that night in their flat. “Fighting evil and saving the world.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “There isn’t actually going to be an alien invasion, you know.”

“Maybe not, but there’ll be something,” he says. “There always is. And you always say we should just leave it alone, but you actually do like fixing it.”

She thinks about that. She does hate blood still, but to be completely honest, he’s not wrong. It’s sort of satisfying, whenever some completely bizarre power thing happens, to know they can stop it. And then to actually do it. “I don’t want to run about saving people from muggers, though,” she says. “There’s loads of them around here, and they’re always really mean, and it’s never worth it.”

“I don’t think you would have to do that,” he says. “But maybe this could be the thing you’ve been looking for. The big thing, I mean. Using our powers for good. Helping people.”

“Hmm,” Alisha says. It might be. It might be. It does sound better than working in a shop. “I suppose I’ve spent so much time trying to save you,” she says, “I just got in the habit of it.”

“But you did save me,” he says, and she rolls her eyes again because it’s so cheesy and then she kisses him. 

*

“I think I’ve just seen a ghost,” Simon says, even paler than usual. And just like that, Sally’s back.

It does concern Alisha. She knows Simon still feels guilty about what happened with Sally. But then she gets distracted.

First the medium brings back the girl with the brainwashing and the cardigan. After last time they dealt with her Alisha swore a solemn oath about how she’d never wear oatmeal again, so even if apparently all Rachel wants to do now is finally remove the stick from her arse and live a little, it takes Alisha a bit to be sure it’s safe to relax. 

And then the first probation worker comes back, which is straight up just fucking terrifying. She still has nightmares sometimes about the way he snarled at them when he tried to kill them. 

Now that he’s back he’s a lot less murdery, but he’s still a pretentious fuck. He calls them feral, which Alisha is pretty sure is not a compliment. But she’s not afraid of him at all anymore, which is nice to know.

She tells him the truth, which is that they’re all only doing the best they can to survive, and he should sort his own shit out. And then he says he needs to go find Sally.

*

Simon texts Alisha a video. Which is strange, because he doesn’t really play around with videos much. He used to, when they first met. She vaguely recalls that he used to always have his face in his phone camera, like he was too afraid to look at the world when he didn’t have a camera lens between him and it, and it was incredibly fucking creepy and one of the things that used to make her feel uncomfortable around him all the time. 

But that stopped all of a sudden. Probably around the same time Sally died.

What is on the video is Simon and Sally, and what Simon is doing in the video is kissing Sally. He is kissing her, and she is undressing in front of him, and he is lying down on the bed — on their bed, on the bed Alisha shares with him — and Sally is climbing on top of him.

She can’t quite wrap her mind around it at first. 

He looked right at her and he told her he would never leave her. He’s never broken a promise to her like that. How could he do this? And in such a cruel way? 

But it’s happening right there, on the video on her phone. She has to believe it, because she’s holding it in the palm of her hand.

 _She had been nice to me_ , Simon told her once. _I wanted it to always keep happening._

She confronts him about it, and all he has to say for himself is, “It’s complicated.” Which is really not fucking good enough.

*

Her boyfriend’s dead ghost sidepiece tries to throw her off the rooftop, but then she doesn’t, because of true love, or something. It all happens pretty fast, and it’s confusing.

And then Simon is there, looking like he’s about to have a heart attack, and he tells her that he didn’t sleep with Sally. That he kissed Sally because he thought he owed her, because he killed her, but nothing else happened, because he could only think of Alisha.

“I never want to be with anyone but you,” he tells her, and he is so sincere.

The boy does do a brilliant sweeping romantic gesture. That’s how he won her over in the first place, isn’t it?

She forgives him because she believes him. He’s a fucking liar, but he’s never lied to her when he has that face on. She forgives him because she loves him. She forgives him because she knows what he means when he says he owes Sally. She still owes him for dying for her.

She puts her arms around him and holds onto him, and she thinks, _No one gets to take you away from me_.

And then she takes him down to the showers and tells him to fuck her against the wall, because after all she promised him a lesson on public shagging, didn’t she.

It’s really fucking good. It’s good the way it always is now, because they know each other’s bodies so well by this point, they can get each other there with just a touch, just a glance. 

And it’s not just their bodies. He knows her now, he actually knows her, and she knows him, too. So when he looks at her she feels like he’s peeling away all the layers of bullshit and drama and makeup and attitude and seeing who she really is, underneath it all, which no one else ever sees; all the worst parts of her, like the part that used her power and liked it, and all the best parts of her, like the part that saved the world and liked it, and he loves all of it. And she sees him, too, all the weird creepy things and the sexy romantic things and the heroic things and the idiot things and the sweet things and she loves him, too, loves all of it. 

They’re there. They’re finally there.

*

When they walk out of the showers, she only has time to see Rachel’s arm move, and a metallic flash. And then something at her throat, so fast that all she feels is heat, and wetness.

She is aware that it is suddenly hard to breathe. She is aware that it is suddenly hard to stand up. She is aware of Simon catching her as she falls. She is aware that he is crying out, that he is sobbing as he looks at her. Which is when she realizes that she is dying.

She has time to think that she wants him to be the last thing she sees. So she looks up at him, and what she sees is that he is wrecked. That he is falling apart, that this is breaking him. The way watching him die broke something in her.

He’s going to go back, she realizes. That fucking liar. He said he wouldn’t and it was a lie. He’s going to go back and he’s going to die for her. 

He’s going to make it so it’s like it’s always happening. He’s going to put her in the freezer like he did with Sally. And it isn’t what she wants at all, at all, at all.


	13. Chapter 13

The first time Alisha sees Simon, she thinks, _What a freak_.

He’s this pale little weirdo, crouched next to his bench with his body too tense and painting the lines too straight. He gives off distinct sex pervert vibes, and while Alisha is into perversion under the right circumstances, these are not those circumstances. So she decides she’ll keep her distance, unless she gets into a very specific mood.

The other blokes at community service are a gobby little areshole who keeps looking sidelong at the chav, which is fine with Alisha. She doesn’t much care for talkers. And also that runner guy, the one who used to be famous, the one who was caught with drugs, who’s got a nice smile and good arms and a perfect arse and who keeps checking out her tits. Alisha thinks, _He’ll do_. 

*  
She does consider shagging Simon. The same way she considers shagging most blokes she meets, as sort of a hobby. She looks at them and she thinks, _What would you be like if I did?_

Nathan would probably try to do some sort of standup routine while he was inside of her, which is a pass. Curtis would probably get competitive, athletes are like that; he’d want her to tell him he’s got the biggest cock she’s ever seen, that she’s never had it so good. Alisha can be down for that.

Judging from what happens when she uses her power, Simon would want to piss on her tits. But probably she could talk him past that, if she decides to go for it. He’s so cringing and awkward, almost certainly a virgin. So if she ever deigns to look at him, he’ll be desperate for it, and really grateful. 

She does like it when blokes are grateful. She could probably talk him into doing anything. Good information to have for her back pocket, in case she ever gets into that very specific mood.

She really doesn’t think of him much beyond that. He’s just sort of always there, cringing away from the rest of them, or staring through his weird little phone camera. Creepy, but basically harmless.

He asks her out once, which is hilarious and extremely gross. And he kills the second probation worker for all of them. Which is sort of sweet, in an extremely fucked-up way. 

They’re all kind of a fucked-up little family now, Alisha supposes, what with all the murdering and shit they’ve been through. Even the weird kid.

*

The guy in the mask is hotter than a guy in a mask has any right to be. Alisha should not be feeling the things that she is feeling about anyone whose face she’s never even seen. For all she knows he could be deformed. He could have a really bad scar. He could have acne. He could have a really bad acne scar.

But he keeps showing up and saving them all in the nick of time and then backflipping away, which is a damn smooth move. And he can touch her without going on and on about all the ways he’s going to bone her, which right now is even smoother. 

When the guy in the mask turns around and she sees that he’s Simon, everything changes all at once. Nothing is ever the same for her after that.

*

He says, “Things are different in the future,” and touches her face, and she thinks, _What would you be like if I did?_

Really intense, she bets. Really intense, and down for basically anything, and if he’s perverted now it’s in a really good way.

*

She falls for him way too fast and way too hard. She can’t understand how he did this to her. Two days ago she never had a spare thought for Simon and now — well, it’s not Simon, not really, it’s someone else. Someone much fitter and sexier and more mysterious, who’s somehow set up shop rent free in her mind. Her future boy.

He touches her like she’s made of glass. He looks at her like she’s the only thing that will save him. She’s never felt anything like this before in her life. 

She keeps looking at the other Simon, the regular one, the creepy one. Trying to make the two of them fit together in her head. She mostly can’t work it out, how the one could come from the other. But then sometimes he’ll say something exactly the way her future boy would say it, like the time he tells her she’s beautiful, and it’s like that’s even worse. It’s easier when she keeps them separate but he just keeps muddying the waters.

Would she, if he had never come back like that? Would she have gotten bored, or pissed, or just in that really specific mood?

No, she wouldn’t have. Probably not. Maybe not.

It doesn’t matter anyway. She doesn’t have to deal with him in that weird creepy stage, because she’s got him when he’s fully cooked.

*

The sex is amazing, but her favorite part is actually afterwards. When they’re lying in the bed together, just holding each other, and he’s gotten loose and relaxed, like she’s fucked all the sadness out of his body. 

He’s too sad the rest of the time, and he won’t tell her why. Some mysterious future thing, she guesses. But after sex, he always smiles at her like he means it, and she tells him about the bullshit they’re doing at community service, and even though he definitely already knows all her community service stories because he was already there for all of it, he listens to her like every single word out of her mouth is fascinating.

“Oh, right, the tattoo guy,” he says. “You know in retrospect I’m actually glad I got to see what Nathan’s seduction method looks like, it was really a template for me.”

“You’re such a fucking liar,” she tells him. “Kelly told me that when Nathan fingered her he pretended his fingers were hand puppets, there’s no way he pulled off any of your moves.”

“Do I have moves?” he wonders. “I never knew.”

“Yeah,” she says, rolling her eyes, “because traveling back in time for a girl isn’t a panty dropper or anything.”

He seems a little tense, suddenly. “I didn’t come back just for sex,” he says. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Well, sure. But it probably doesn’t hurt,” she reasons. 

He fiddles with a piece of her hair. “Are you happy I came back?” he asks her.

She raises her eyebrows. “Am I happy you came back and saved all our lives?” she asks. “Am I happy you came back and we had really good sex? Of course I am.” She kisses him, just a soft little brush of the lips, and then pulls away. “But actually this is the best bit. Right now, when it’s just us like this. Don’t you think so?”

He smiles at her in the way he does, slow and a little wondering. “Yeah,” he says. “I wish it were always happening.”

“That’s a creepy fucking thing to say,” she informs him. 

She says shit like that to him all the time, more often because it seems funny to her than because he’s actually being creepy, and mostly he’s not offended. But this time he just goes very still, and all that sadness from before comes back to him. 

“Hey,” she says, and brushes his hair back from his face. “I was only teasing. Don’t be sad.”

He shakes his head, kisses her forehead. “I’m not,” he says. “But I’m sorry, Alisha.”

She doesn’t know what he means by that, at the time. And by the time she realizes, it’s already too late.


End file.
